Illustration by Jeff Dunn
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Anaïs Nin’s psychoanalyst, Otto Rank, informed us that interpretation is what transforms life’s dream into art. Three such interpreters at Oakland East Bay Symphony’s Friday concert at the Paramount Theatre — two conductors and the featured soloist — transformed composers’ dreams into art worthy of both praise and concern.
The first interpreter, Assistant Conductor Bryan Nies, led off the concert with Gustav Holst’s Planets, a classic that has kept audiences in its plane of ecliptic since 1918, when backstage janitorial staff spontaneously danced to the “Jupiter” movement. Nies’ first interpretive challenge was to choose effective tempos for the seven movements. This he did admirably, in my book: not too fast for “Mars” or “Saturn,” not too slow for “Mercury,” and just right for the rest.
But the next challenge gets to the real meat of interpretation, which is to decide how to play what’s not written in the score. (The great cellist Pablo Casals even expanded beyond this and described interpretation as not playing what is written, but we won’t go there today.)
For example, the “Mars” movement has a central, relatively quiet section in which the orchestra plays sinuous, ominously repeating lines of notes underlain by what musicians informally call “hairpins” (crescendo and decrescendo marks). You can see these in the illustration as respective diverging or converging lines below the staff. Holst wrote “p” at the beginning, to say “start quietly” (Italian piano), but he didn’t mark how loud to get before the decrescendo hairpin. The question mark represents the interpretive decision here.
Throughout this central passage Nies chose to make the question-mark part of the phrase barely louder than the beginning. This isn’t contradicted by the score, though his failing to get quite a bit louder toward the end of the measure greatly detracts from the menacing affect of the music here. “Mars,” written on the brink of the First World War, is one of the scariest pieces ever written and deserves at least a mezzoforte (“medium loud”) sound between hairpins.
Another missed opportunity occurred in the movement “Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age” (roman numeral II in the score), where Holst has much of the orchestra playing detached chords on the second and fourth beats of the measure. Holst didn’t write accents for these off-beat sounds in the score, but most experienced conductors provide them, for their plodding inevitability can support thoughts of encroaching infirmity and death, as suggested by the title. Nies made them sound more like distant chimes than progressive blows.
Fortunately, he did provide a better accent regimen in the following movement, “Uranus, the Magician.” But at the end of both it and “Saturn,” he failed to provide smooth transitions to silence, causing an untoward abruptness.
Familiar as The Planets is, it’s not easy for conductors and musicians. Some passages present difficulties of synchronization. Nies did a fair job in this department for much of the music, but I’m very concerned that the amplification used (yes, acoustics are that bad at the Paramount venue) may have caused distortion that reduced the perceived clarity of attack for listeners.
Student Musicians Join In the Fray
Interpretation aside, the orchestra is to be commended for fine execution on its part. Even the student musicians who joined the orchestra after intermission for Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Peer Gynt did a great job, to the credit of the orchestra’s educational outreach programs. Music Director Michael Morgan, after kindly giving Nies a major work to wrestle with, returned to the podium, and proved he really knew how to ride Grieg’s accents in this predecessor in concept to Ravel’s one-tune-repeated-over-and-over Bolero.
The evening concluded with Billy Childs' (b. 1957) Violin Concerto, written just last year. I found it peculiar that it was composed for the soloist, Regina Carter, since her interpretive style didn’t seem to mesh with the rather romantic sensibilities of the music. Carter’s jazz-inflected approach, while technically fully adequate to the demands of the music, deemphasized vibrato. The effect, which was most pronounced for the main sad melody in the first movement (which sounded like a cross between the styles of Joaquín Rodrigo and Miklós Rózsa), reduced the lushness that seemed called for by the curve of the music and its poignant harmonies. However, the lack of vibrato was effective in a central, more improvisational section studded with fascinating little glissandos between notes.
Childs' piece employed a fairly unusual, two-movement structure, but did so quite successfully. The opening slow movement was far from static, and the concluding “Dies Irae,” yet another riff on that long-lived chant associated with death, provided plenty of scampery pizzazz and counterpoint.
The appreciative audience was rewarded by Carter’s return for an encore with a bass and two cellos, in Miles Davis’ All Blues.
Interpret the above as a wish to hear more from Billy Childs, and a thank-you to Michael Morgan and his orchestra for presenting an intriguing evening, hairpins and all.