In the Post: Dancing to the Gran Partita

Mozart, Serenade in B-flat Major ("Gran Partita"), Orchestre des Champs-Élysées, P. Herreweghe (Harmonia Mundi, 1995)

Charles T. Downey, PostClassical Ensemble presents Mozart through a different lens (Washington Post, September 19)

PostClassical Ensemble likes to refract familiar music through a different lens. For its season opener, heard on Saturday evening at Sidney Harman Hall, the piece of music was Mozart’s “Serenade in B-flat Major,” K. 361/370a. Executive director Joseph Horowitz created a three-part, rather fanciful production involving drama and dance.

When Mozart settled in Vienna he cast about looking for any kind of sustainable work. This serenade for eight woodwinds, four horns and double bass was one of several pieces likely intended for virtuoso wind players at the Imperial Court. Its performance, the evening’s main attraction, was less raucous, more polite than the one given on historical instruments by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment at the Library of Congress a decade ago, for example.

Fatma Daglar produced a limpid sound, as if buoyed on a cloud, in the famous opening oboe phrase of the Adagio. The basset horn parts, played on modern versions of the instrument, were shaky at times and sometimes rushed. The bassoons were solid on the bass lines, including Truman Harris, a late, uncredited substitution on first bassoon. Conductor Angel Gil-Ordóñez probably got in the way of the musicians more than helped them, and the persistent squeak of his shoes on the stage’s shiny floor distracted the ears.

In the evening’s first part, Philip Hosford played the character of Salieri, extended from Peter Shaffer’s play “Amadeus.” Three student musicians played two Mozart pieces, not listed in the program, revealing nervousness in breath support and intonation. At the end of the evening, the musicians repeated three movements from the serenade, to accompany the Washington Ballet Studio Company in a beautiful new choreography by Igal Perry. Of all the possible intentions for this music, dance is not one of them, but it was at least encouraging to see this company’s dancers moving to the sounds of live music again.

FURTHER THOUGHTS:
This was Igal Perry's debut with Washington Ballet. With his Peridance Contemporary Dance Company, he made a choreography for PostClassical Ensemble's performance of Falla's El Amor Brujo in 2011. For that his choreography missed the mark, at least for me, but here he made something quite beautiful. It would be interesting to see what he did with the entire serenade. Twelve dancers in unisex gray shorts and sleeveless tops formed male-female pairs, with the basic number of four pairs sometimes contracted, sometimes enlarged. The famous opening of the Adagio, the first number in the choreography, was realized in movement as the dancers slowly walked around the space to the "squeezebox" chordal patterns that open the piece. The soaring long-note melody was matched by graceful lifts of women with their legs splayed apart.

The triple meter of the second menuet movement began with three dancers, one woman and two men, and elements of French courtly dance seem to have played in Perry's imagination. Another couple was added for the trio, while the largest number of dancers appeared in the bubbling, active choreography that went with the Finale movement.

SEE ALSO:
Charles T. Downey, Boulez Pairs Mozart with Berg (Ionarts, August 27, 2009)

---, OAE @ LOC (Ionarts, December 9, 2006)

Washington Bach Consort

In recent years, the Washington Bach Consort has taken to styling itself "The Nation's Premier Baroque Chorus and Orchestra," using the phrase on their Flash Web site and in the program for their Sunday afternoon concert at the Harman Center. Since that assessment is not credited to a newspaper critic or other independent source, we must assume that the words were chosen by someone within the organization. If so, it is an act of hyperbolic hubris, a Cassiopeian boast, that cries out for comment, and the lot appears to fall to me to pose the question. Is the Washington Bach Consort actually the nation's premier Baroque chorus and orchestra?

Sunday's concert was generally good, on par with most of the group's performances, but there were enough sounds that were frankly mediocre to cause a reasonable person to say nay. This performance of five concerti for violin and harpsichord was rife with the problems of intonation and accuracy that Pinchas Zukerman famously criticized as proving that period performance must be an aberration. As lead soloist, concertmaster Tim Haig played with consummate musicianship, but at the fleet tempi of many fast movements (sometimes arrived at after considerable disagreement in the opening bars, as in BWV 1043 and 1052), the other string players struggled to keep up or underplayed.

The slow movements of BWV 1041 and 1043 had a pleasing lilt but may have been just a notch too fast. The contributions of two other violin soloists, especially in the triple-violin concerto BWV 1064R, were valiant but marred more often than not by squeaky, imprecise playing. The ultra-capable harpischord soloists were Scott Dettra and the group's director, J. Reilly Lewis, who both played extremely well on BWV 1062, Bach's reworking of the concerto for two violins as a double-harpsichord tour de force. It was a mixed concert in many ways, and the polite applause offered by the group's supporters (who did not fill the Harman Center's mid-sized hall) was tellingly brief.

Cassiopeia mosaic from Palmyra, Syrian National Museum

Over its 30 years of playing the music of J. S. Bach in the Washington area, the Bach Consort has made three concert visits to Germany (1981, 1985, and 2000) and released three recordings on minor labels (a complete Bach motets set from Pro Organo now hard to find, a very good pairing of the C. P. E. and J. S. Bach Magnificats from Newport Classic in 1999, and a worthy disc billed as volume 1 of a complete set of J. S. Bach's Mass settings from Loft Recordings in 2004). A new recording of soprano cantatas with Elizabeth Futral, presumably made in the wake of their 2006 concert collaboration, is expected. In their concert history, they have given good, sometimes excellent performances of all (or nearly all) of Bach's choral masterpieces, sometimes under distinguished guest conductors, and almost always here in Washington.

The best contribution the Bach Consort makes to Washington's musical life is their monthly cantata series, during the course of which the group has recently completed performing each and every Bach cantata at least once. As reviewed here a few times, these noontime concerts, offered free of charge to the public, are a treasured moment of peace in the busy lives of many people. Still, does this worthy history justify the group's self-appellation as the leading exponent of the HIP (Baroque) movement in the United States? Does the Washington Bach Consort really merit comparison to the best European Baroque music ensembles -- say, Les Arts Florissants or Les Musiciens du Louvre (France), Concerto Italiano or Venice Baroque Orchestra (Italy), the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin (Germany), or the Academy of Ancient Music (U.K.)?

Other Reviews: Cecelia Porter, Bach Is Instrumental To Consort's Success (Washington Post, January 24)

On balance, while there is much to admire, it seems they are not there quite yet. By comparison with the situation in Europe, the HIP movement in the United States is generally moribund, but groups like Apollo's Fire (Cleveland) and the Boston Camerata at least travel more regularly and are known more widely outside Washington. In fact, Le Monde named the Boston Camerata as "America's foremost early music ensemble" at one point, but that group's specialty would be medieval music (although they have made recordings of Renaissance and Baroque music, too).

The next concert by the Washington Bach Consort is a noontime cantata (March 4, 12 noon) at the Church of the Epiphany, featuring Aus der Tiefen rufe ich, Herr, zu dir (BWV 131) and organist Diane Heath playing the Prelude and Fugue in C Major, BWV 531.

Gabriela Montero Baptizes Sidney Harman Hall

Washington Performing Arts Society inaugurated its relationship with the brand-new downtown venue, Sidney Harman Hall, with a recital by Venezuelan-American pianist Gabriela Montero on Saturday afternoon. From reading articles about her abilities as an improviser (you can listen to her profile on NPR), we have been keen to hear her play for a couple years, especially since she had to cancel her 2005 recital at the Corcoran. As you would expect of someone who took a Bronze Medal at the 1995 International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, she was certainly technically impressive, if not rock solid, in a challenging program of three daunting works in the standard repertoire.

A weighty thud of Montero's hand plopped down on the Steinway's keyboard at the opening of Busoni's arrangement of the Bach chaconne. It was, it turns out, the hallmark of her style, tending toward strong attack and full sound over subtlety and shaping of melodic lines. This is not the best way to play Bach, but it is a very good way to play Busoni's thunderous refashioning of Bach, and it was thrilling to hear Montero maxed out on all those octaves. (Montero's hard-edged tone, tempestuous flair, and now wild hair often call to mind the elder pianist who has done so much to further her career, Martha Argerich -- Liszt, Prokofiev, Stravinsky should be strong suits.) There were sections that featured colorful contrasts of tone, but an overuse of the sustaining pedal muddied some of the finer fingerwork. While nothing is left to chance in the Bach-Busoni piece, the chaconne was at heart an improvisatory genre, and the remaining two pieces, sonatas by Chopin and Schumann, reinforced the theme of improvisation that ran through the program.

Other Reviews: Tim Page, Classical Pianist Montero, Quite A 'Jingle' Belle (Washington Post, December 17)

Montero pushed the tempi of the first two movements of the second Chopin sonata (B-flat minor, op. 35), making for some exciting passages, especially in the repeated-note section (a forte of her technique) at the end of the first movement's exposition. The gentle trio was more pleasing than the scherzo, amped up just a notch or two too fast for sound control. The funeral march was too much of a plodding trudge, except for the middle section, a sotto voce evocation of happier days, but the fourth movement, played attacca from the end of the funeral march, was a dramatically effective, soft-pedaled blur of runs and arpeggios. A much less appealing and therefore less familiar piece, Schumann's first sonata "Eusebius and Florestan" (F-sharp minor, op. 11), continued the theme of improvisation. A brooding introduction to the first movement gave way to passages of heroic, Davidsbündler sounds. Montero seemed the most technically comfortable here and gave a broader range of colors and attacks, with a murky web of sound under a chiming melody in the second movement and a jokester's scherzo and Carnivalesque intermezzo.


Gabriela Montero improvising at the Kölner Philharmonie
(see more videos from the Cologne recital here)
Some of the audience headed for the exits at the end of the Schumann, not wanting to hear music created on the spot, but most of us stayed for the most unusual part of Gabriela Montero's performance. Appearing with a microphone in hand, she thanked us for staying and asked the audience to sing her some melodies to use as the basis for her improvisations. With all four of them (Puccini's Nessun dorma, Jingle Bells, Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1, and Beethoven's Ode to Joy), she listened, worked out the tune, played it through with more or less its usual harmonization, and then launched into the world of her musical fancy.

Gabriela Montero: Baroque Album Bach and Beyond Chopin, Falla, Ginestera

Some of her efforts were of greater interest than others, and in general she was more successful in her imitation of recognizable models (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Joplin rag, tango) than in her own occasionally nondescript style. Still, there is no doubt that she has a fecund imagination for harmony, melody, and rhythm, all of which were heard in admirable variety. For so many reasons, not the least important of which is the importance of extemporized embellishments needed to perform Baroque music, one hopes that the result of Montero's application of her improvisatory gifts to her concert career will be to inspire other classical musicians to take up improvisation. See more clips of her improvisations and even suggest a theme for her future improvisation podcasts, to be called "Live from My Living Room," at her Web site.

Sidney Harman Hall, an expansion of the Shakespeare Theater, has its glass and steel façade (reminiscent of the beautiful addition to the Pierpont Morgan Library) on F Street, facing the Verizon Center. Its main space -- black stage and dark wood details -- seats 775 people, in a wide arrangement, making the sound less warm and direct than the Terrace Theater to my ears, but still intimate. This new downtown venue, if an article in The Economist (Capital of culture, October 4) is to be believed, will help foster "an intellectual and artistic renaissance" in Washington. Charles Isherwood's article for the New York Times (The Graffiti of the Philanthropic Class, December 2) was snide but spot-on, taking note of the overabundance of large plain lettering in the space, with every possible architectural component named for a donor. Instead of chimes or flashing lights, an airport-style loudspeaker announcement chided the audience to return to their seats after intermission. That unfortunately cut into the buzz of my $3 (!) espresso.

The final WPAS concert for the calendar year is tomorrow night, featuring violist Jennifer Stumm (December 18, 7:30 pm) at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater.