Some "regional orchestras" settle down to the comfort levels of their audiences and their all too often exhausted players. During Jeffrey Kahane's tenure as music director, the Santa Rosa Symphony distinguished itself repeatedly as the one stop on the "Freeway Philharmonic" circuit where players and audience alike were encouraged, or rather commanded, to stretch their ears. It appears that Bruno Ferrandis, in his second year as Kahane's successor, is determined to do likewise.
It might seem strange, in this election year, to see the virtual banner of "More of the Same!" hoisted triumphantly over the Wells Fargo Center in Santa Rosa. But that was what, in the best sense, Monday night's audience got: the same thirst for new talent, the same urge to stretch the orchestra's capacities on meaty repertoire, the same itch to challenge a North Bay audience that I don't doubt the demographers have prepegged as complacently conservative, at least in the musical sense.
Actually, nearly all the audience stuck around after intermission Monday for Béla Bartók's
Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. Beethoven — the "Leonore" Overture No. 2 and the Violin Concerto — took up the first half. You might expect a cynical program-designer to put the Violin Concerto after intermission and the Bartók before, so as to lock in an audience for everything — that is, until the yet-more-cynical orchestra manager told you just how long it would take to set up the stage for the double-string-orchestra Bartók, and how long to take it down again. But this time the first cynic was confounded.
Programming the Bartók —
this Bartók — takes audacity. At least the composer's other big orchestral scores have splashes of orchestral color to fall back on; here, it's the strings that have to carry nearly everything, and divided to boot. Santa Rosa, moreover, was missing some of its leading string players. Principal violist Linda Ghidossi-DeLuca is on a year's leave, and Associate Concertmaster Jeanelle Meyer took over the head spot in Concertmaster Joseph Edelberg's absence.
Still, the performance was one to make you ignore the threadbare bits and admire the guts. It wasn't razor-edge tight or perfectly in tune. But it was concentrated, single-minded, and obviously the product of an extraordinary amount of focused musicianly energy. It would seem sometimes about to spin off the rails, but the potential wheel-tripping disasters always vanished somehow into a general past haze of not-quite-togetherness. You had hardly registered a danger before it had flashed away past you, into a flock of other nasty might-have-beens.
And at its best the orchestra dug in and found sounds I hardly thought it had. I don't mean only the climaxes, though they were grand (I'll savor for some time that deep, parallel-chord version of the fugue theme from the end of the last movement). I mean also the sustained counterpoint of the first movement, and the occasional flippancies of the second and fourth. Ferrandis didn't strike me as ideally clear for his players all the time — in places it seemed to me that his beat was more hindrance than help — but when it came to conveying the moment-by-moment character of the music, he did all you could want.
Star Spotter
The Santa Rosa Symphony has made something of a habit of being the first in the Bay Area to engage a new soloist who subsequently becomes a household word. Violinist Hilary Hahn, for example, made her first Bay Area appearance with the SRS, in 1999, and, two major-label record contracts further on, has been back, at splashier venues, almost every year since.
Vadim Gluzman, who appeared as soloist in the Beethoven Violin Concerto Monday night, is not quite the freak of musical nature Hahn is. But he
is a remarkable violinist, and it's sheer bad luck for Santa Rosa that these concerts represented his
third appearance here in 2008. A few months after his Bay Area debut (in the
Tchaikovsky Concerto, with the Marin Symphony), Gluzman was pressed into service with the San Francisco Symphony in the
Shostakovich First Concerto after Vadim Repin unexpectedly withdrew.
Gluzman's Beethoven was burnished, confident, and maybe a shade too comfortable for comfort. The yards of fast passagework glittered; the many expanses of legato sang. Gluzman has one of those frighteningly incisive Russian bow arms, capable of miracles of sostenuto, but also has fantastic definition of strokes at the tip of the bow. He didn't break out that trick as often as he might have, though when he did, as in the run-up to the first movement's recapitulation, it was jaw-dropping.
That sort of technical reticence was of a piece with his playing all through. It didn't go out of its way to be flashy; it was merely gleaming and solid, supremely sure of itself, and sometimes just a little eager to get through things.
Certainly, wherever there was a variance of opinion about tempo — and there were many — it was Gluzman who wanted to move, Ferrandis who wanted to linger. The opening tempo of the first movement was leisurely indeed, to the point where the four repeated notes that open the piece represented a hazard every time they returned: Some impetuous player always fell in a shade early.
Irresistible Playing
Whenever Gluzman appeared, the tempo generally jumped a notch. For a player with such a seductive sound, he seemed oddly disinclined to relax, but neither did he strain to make the audience's blood race. At his best, he carried you along effortlessly, with a winning swing to the phrasing. His way of playing the theme of the finale — the first bar incisive, the next suaver and more legato — was irresistible.
Gluzman's choice of cadenzas suited the performance well. They were stylish, concise, and (to me) unknown — not the familiar Kreisler or Joachim, not Joseph Silverstein's hypervirtuosic ones, nor Schnittke's outlandishly polystylistic ones. They turned out to be by Nathan Milstein, a violinist who wasn't above freakish pyrotechnics for the hell of it, but who kept that taste in check when writing these. Gluzman cut the first-movement one a bit, in keeping with his disposition not to tarry.
By way of an encore, Gluzman gave us what is turning out to be his Bay Area signature piece. It was the first movement of Eugène Ysaÿe's second solo sonata, the one dedicated to Jacques Thibaud and titled
Obsession, in allusion to the way it works in Thibaud's favorite Bach snippet and the "Dies irae" chant. I can see why Gluzman favors this: The way he plays it, it's one great whirlwind of bow- and finger-work, fearsomely impressive. Also, at his speed (in contradistinction to everyone else's), it's short enough to make an effective encore.
In the Beethoven overture, the orchestra was supplemented by a dozen or so Santa Rosa Symphony Youth Orchestra players. It's to their credit that the only negative thing I was inclined to attribute to their presence — a little fuzz in the string articulation — seemed to be there just as much in the concerto, where they didn't play. The performance had its rocky moments (in those long chains of syncopations, you couldn't be quite sure how things were going to shake out), but in the end you found yourself on solid ground, as indeed you did in the concert as a whole. That's Santa Rosa all over: stretching out onto a thin ledge, finding bedrock.