Sunday, November 11, 2018

Discovering Barber’s Cello Concerto at BARS

Last night in the Everett Middle School Auditorium, the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony (BARS) presented the “winter installment” (over four weeks ahead of schedule) in their seasonally-structured programming of four concerts correlating roughly with the four seasons. Like the Fall Concert, last night’s performance featured a guest conductor, Leif Bjaland. It also featured, as the soloist for the evening, cellist Evan Khan, a recent graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. At the end of last year, when he gave the first of his two Graduate Recitals, Kahn played the first movement of Samuel Barber’s Opus 22 concerto in A minor with piano accompaniment. Last night he played the concerto in its entirety accompanied by the necessary instrumental resources.

To call this concerto challenging would be the height of understatement. Kahn wrote his own notes for the program book in which he explained that the concerto was composed for the Russian cellist Raya Garbousova. Garbousova’s technique was prodigious unto an extreme; and, during an initial “orientation” session with her, Barber realized that no technical challenge would be too great for her. The result was a concerto whose “text” verged on the impossible, delivered through unabashedly aggressive rhetoric. Completed in 1945, the work contrasted sharply with the lyrical qualities of his Opus 14 violin concerto, composed in 1939. (Mind you, these two concertos were separated by Barber’s service as an army corporal during World War II.)

Whatever challenges Barber posed, Kahn rose to them with all the necessary technical skill and rhetorical expressiveness. Those fortunate enough to have been exposed to a generous sample of Barber’s repertoire (not an easy achievement these days) would have encountered occasional gestures of recognition in some of the composer’s more familiar tropes. Nevertheless, this is music that is solidly established in its own context, a context established by Barber’s personal life history and the virtuoso reputation of the cellist for whom the concerto was composed. When I wrote about the concerto’s performance at Kahn’s graduate recital, I described the occasion as “a particularly stimulating journey of discovery.” Last night the journey was just as stimulating, all the richer for the overall three-movement plan and the sharply contrasting colors of Barber’s orchestral writing.

Indeed, rich orchestral colors were in play throughout the entire program. In describing the opening selection to last night’s audience, composer Byron Adams explained that he intended his “Capriccio concertante” to serve as a platform for the full palette of instrumental sonorities. He also unabashedly asserted that he wished to music to be a declaration of his own gay identity. Beyond any political agenda, however, this was upbeat music that readily seized the attention of anyone willing to listen; and the sheer joy of the rhetoric established a mood that would pervade the entire evening.

Seating in the hall was open last night; and, through the “luck of the draw,” I happened to find myself across the aisle from Adams. During his enthusiastic verbal introduction, I was reminded of one remark that Roger Sessions dropped at one of the Norton Lectures he gave at Harvard University. It was a cautionary observation that the best composers are the ones that can listen to a piece they had written twenty years earlier without blushing. “Capriccio concertante” was completed in 1990. Whenever I glanced at Adams listening to BARS play his music, he was having one hell of a good time, about as far from blushing as you can conceive!

Adams also provided introductory remarks for the second half of the program, Edward Elgar’s Opus 36 set of concert variations on an original theme. The noun “Enigma” was added to the title page when the score was published by Elgar’s friend August Jaeger. Each variation has a cryptic title that refers to one of the composer’s close acquaintances. Adams, however, suggested that these variations are not so much character sketches as they are reflections of what each of the characters thought of Elgar himself.

Photograph of Elgar taken not long after the completion of his Opus 36 (photographer unknown, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

While I find this an interesting perspective, the documentary record has at least one counterexample. This concerns the eleventh variation, “G.R.S.,” named for George Robertson Sinclair, organist at Hereford Cathedral. Elgar provided his own account of the ideas behind this variation (quoted in the Wikipedia page for the composition):
The variation, however, has nothing to do with organs or cathedrals, or, except remotely, with G.R.S. The first few bars were suggested by his great bulldog, Dan (a well-known character) falling down the steep bank into the River Wye (bar 1); his paddling upstream to find a landing place (bars 2 and 3); and his rejoicing bark on landing (second half of bar 5). G.R.S. said, 'Set that to music'. I did; here it is.
Any thoughts that Sinclair himself (or Dan) had about Elgar do not seem to have figured into this variation!

Indeed, I have long felt that any well-conceived interpretation of the Opus 36 can stand up quite well without the listener having to “decode” any of the variations. Bjaland provided such an interpretation last night, and the full forces of the BARS ensemble were with him every step along the way. Since Elgar himself made it clear that “the work may be listened to as a ‘piece of music’ apart from any extraneous consideration.” I, for one, took great pleasure in attending almost entirely (Dan is always the inevitable exception) to the clarity that Bjaland brought to establishing the relations between variations and theme.

In the midst of all this rich instrumental color and rhetoric, the one introspective moment came with Kahn’s solo encore after his concerto performance. Indeed, the very title of his encore selection was introspective, one of the nine movements from “After Reading Shakespeare” by Ned Rorem. According to the list of compositions on The Official Ned Rorem Website, this was Rorem’s only composition for solo cello. These were clearly personal reactions to specific passages and characters. Kahn did not provide any details, but one could still appreciate the composer’s sensitivity to the spirit of close reading.

No comments:

Post a Comment