The Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra played a concert of Respighi, Mozart and Beethoven in Harvard Square on Saturday night. The venue was the spacious First Church Cambridge, with fifty-foot vaulted ceilings over the nave and a deeply recessed altar. The acoustics of this architecture would be well suited to plainchant, its long meandering vocal lines lingering in a cavernous echo to evoke infinite time and space. The orchestra used this reverberation to its advantage in the first item of the program.
Ottorino Respighi was a twentieth-century composer who very much looked back to earlier musical eras. His 1932 work for string orchestra, Ancient Airs and Dances, Suite No 3, is an adaptation of 16th- and 17th-century music for lute and guitar. The Pro Arte string section comprises twenty players: 6 first violins, 5 second violins, 4 violas, 3 cellos and 2 basses. The violins sat to the left (as we looked at them) with their sound holes facing the audience. This gave their instruments an immediate and bright sound. The violas, larger and darker-toned instruments, were to the center right of the semicircle, with their sound holes facing the altar. This means their sound had to travel to the far curves of the chancel before coming back to the audience. In the "Arie di corte" the viola answer to the violin theme was quieter and carried more reverb; the effect was like a ghost of music past summoned across the centuries.
The Pro Arte bills itself as a "Mozart-sized orchestra", which means they perform with 20 to 35 players, in contrast to the 50 to 60+ players of a full symphony orchestra. This leanness paid off in Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A major, K622. The soloist was Ian Greitzer, the principal clarinetist of the ensemble, and he showed a masterful ability to play with whisper softness. This in turn drew quiet support from the musicians behind him, keeping the cavernous echo out of play.
The final piece was Beethoven's Symphony No 8 in F major. The historically informed movement of recent decades has led to a reexamination of Beethoven's music. Bloated performance practice has been swept aside in favor of the quicker tempos that the composer actually marked in his scores. Is there an absolute correct way to play Beethoven's symphonies? The results from Pro Arte's attempt would suggest not.
Conductor Kevin Rhodes gave a spirited reading of the symphony but didn't reckon with the acoustics of the church. Any loud passage, and there were quite a few, produced an over-reverberation that blurred the details of the score. There are several points in the the first movement where Beethoven writes five beats of silence. The echo was just dying away by the time the instruments came in again. The second movement has the winds playing repeated pulses in the background, but these musicians were competing with their own slap-back. It would have been more rewarding for Rhodes to find a slower tempo that aligned the echo of one note to the attack of a following note. A stately, genial reading could have been just as valid as a sprightly one in the given circumstances.
The B-section of the third movement begins with two horns harmonizing on a broad melody, with a solo cello skipping up and down the fingerboard and basses plucking the downbeats. The Pro Arte horns warbled away, obliterating the cello. The cellist might just have well not played at all; the moment would have come off better with the "uninformed" practice of all three cellos playing a sectional soli. The rollicking fourth movement was mud.
I applaud Pro Arte's mission, but this chamber orchestra needs to find the right chamber. The next concert in January is at First Baptist Church Newton. I am not optimistic.
No comments:
Post a Comment