Revolution in Santa Rosa

Noted UCLA musicologist Robert Winter and guest conductor George Thomson joined forces on Saturday night with the Santa Rosa Symphony to produce a Symphonie fantastique in its native habitat: the golden age of literature and the arts that was Paris in 1830, the year the restored Bourbon monarchy ended in revolution. Their "revolutionary" program design — a richly illustrated lecture-demonstration followed by a performance — harked back, not only to the salons of 19th-century Paris, but also to the turn-of-the-century American Chautauqua lecture tradition, in which edification was considered a prime form of entertainment. The extraordinary nature of the presentation helped the audience to banish the museum-culture feel of the average performance of the Fantastique, in which half the audience is fully capable of humming along with the English horn, and demanded that it feel something of the startling nature of Berlioz' revolutionary work. Professor Winter made a witty host. From the first appreciative chuckle (showing the "big hair" picture of Berlioz, he asks, "How many of you think he's cute?") to the sustained applause at the end of his hour-long presentation, the musically sophisticated audience, many of whom were able to answer his classroom-style question about a picture of a young Franz Liszt, loved him. Wearing a rumpled sports coat and open collar amid the orchestra's formal black tailcoats, using not just one but two computer laptops to display contemporaneous portraits and daguerreotypes, and rummaging through a pile of dusty library volumes and archival documents to find an extra quotation or two on the spur of the moment, he caricatured the university professor with a gusto not seen since Ryan O'Neal in What's Up, Doc? Thomson and the orchestra illustrated the part of the lecture on Berlioz' invention of "program music" with great élan, serving up excerpts on demand, including tidy cutoffs at cadence points that Thomson improvised on the spot.

Revitalizing the Concert Hall Environment

In the performance, orchestra and conductor were truly étonnant. Every solo instrument could be heard with startling clarity (for example, the low-register flute passage sounding over a full string section accompaniment), and the articulations and dynamic contrasts were crisp and clean. The intonation approached perfection (for example, when the two tubas played the Dies Irae in the last movement, it was so well in tune that you could hear the overtone an octave above the upper part), and each of the string sections. and particularly the cellos, played as though with a single voice. The "Witches Dance" fugue, both in the lecture-demonstration and in the performance, was wonderfully clear. Every entrance of the subject stood out from the counterpoints, and you could feel the outrage and astonishment the Parisian audiences must have felt when the sacred chant Dies Irae was joined into the pagan dance. After the performance came yet one more revolution. While patrons gathered in the lobby of the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts to discuss the construction of the new hall and the recently announced new season, the musicians conducted informational leafleting in the parking lot concerning upcoming contract renewal negotiations. Imaginative programming such as this has the potential to bring more listeners into the concert hall, revitalizing an environment that could use an infusion of new friends. This collaboration between musicology and performance resulted in an opportunity to hear new meanings and find new pleasures in a symphonic warhorse. The approach, and other forms of creative collaboration, is a step in the direction of the cultural cross-pollination and fermentation that was Revolutionary Paris in 1830.