The San Jose Chamber Orchestra’s concert on Sunday, Nov. 17, was a brief affair — two works, each 30–40 minutes long, with no intermission — but it took three conductors to get through it. Despite this, St. Francis Episcopal Church was the site of no drama and no evident confusion, just some good music-making.
The opening piece was Paso del Fuego by Pablo E. Furman, a raw and vigorous suite, written in a revived early 20th-century neoclassical style, that SJCO premiered back in 2010. Music Director Barbara Day Turner was already planning to step down for the two slow movements to let the orchestra play without a conductor. But on returning to the podium for the third movement, she announced that she was feeling too ill to continue and called on Furman, who was in attendance, to come up and finish the performance. This he did with no preparation, observing to the audience that it was a pleasure to become reacquainted with his own music. (SJCO later confirmed that Turner has recovered.)
The other offering on the program was Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas (also known as The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires) by Argentine tango composer Astor Piazzolla, as arranged for solo violin and strings by Leonid Desyatnikov. Arriving onstage, SJCO concertmaster Liana Bérubé remarked, “I guess I’ve just been promoted,” and did what conducting and cueing was necessary while also soloing pretty much continuously throughout the four-movement work.
The performance started with a somewhat sluggish “Summer,” Bérubé’s violin merging quietly into the orchestral part, but the music picked up later in the movement, becoming livelier. In the succeeding seasons, Bérubé had more of a chance to display a freewheeling and relaxed style that is so well suited to Piazzolla’s music. The members of the string orchestra also had moments to shine, notably principal cello Matthew Linaman in a solo passage in “Autumn” and the entire ensemble in the rhythmic scratch tones, in the style of a percussion rasp, in the concluding “Spring.”
Desyatnikov to some degree recomposed Piazzolla’s originals, which is not normally done by classical arrangers — but then Piazzolla wasn’t strictly a classical composer. Most notably, Desyatnikov inserted tiny quotations from Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons here and there, as well as sly little references to J.S. Bach and Pachelbel’s Canon. These just increased the fun in this lively and entertaining piece.
Furman’s Paso del Fuego is also a concerto, the soloists being a string quartet. The interplay between them and the string orchestra, so similar to the dialogue between concertino and ripieno in Baroque music, is suggestive of 20th-century neoclassicism (which was often more neo-Baroque anyway), as is Furman’s crustily dissonant yet mostly diatonic writing.
While the three fast movements were busy and intricate, with the soloists and orchestra playing together or bouncing off each other, the two slow movements gave more of a chance for solo display over quieter accompaniment. Mostly the quartet played together, but there was some room for individual virtuosity, with violist Ivo Bokulic and cellist Christopher Costanza dominating in the second movement and violinists Debra Fong and Rochelle Nguyen doing so in the fourth.
Though displaying as much energy as the Piazzolla, this is an altogether more serious piece. Furman intended it as a musical allegory, in the words of Stephen Ruppenthal’s program note, depicting the journey from Ukraine to Argentina (where Furman was born). Allusions to Orthodox liturgical chant and Argentine folk music are present, more subtly presented than Desyatnikov’s Baroque additions to Piazzolla.
All the soloists performed with firm determination, and the sometimes conductorless orchestra gave conscientious attention to the rhythms and forward motion of the music. It was a gratifying performance under difficult conditions.
