Last night in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the New Century Chamber Orchestra gave the first San Francisco performance in its 2018–2019 season. British violinist Anthony Marwood was the principal soloist on the program in addition to leading the ensemble as Guest Concertmaster. The high point of the evening occupied the second half of the program, devoted entirely to “Tālā Gaisma” (distant light), a 30-minute single-movement concerto for violin and string orchestra by Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks. Written between 1996 and 1997, the concerto was given the Latvian Grand Music Award in 1997.
Pēteris Vasks (photograph by Hokit, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)
Like many of his age (Vasks was born in 1946, the same year as yours truly), Vasks was drawn to many of the different approaches to “extreme abstraction” that flourished in the Fifties and Sixties, followed by the “minimalist backlash” of the Seventies and Eighties. Ultimately, Vasks departed from the prevailing trends, falling back on a tonal lyricism in which he was never afraid to insert provocative dissonances. “Tālā Gaisma” is one of several works for violin and strings; and Vasks’ approach to cadenza writing occasionally seems to reflect the technical challenges one finds in Jean Sibelius’ violin concerto alongside some of Sibelius’ more “naturalistic” approaches to rhetoric. Vasks’ aesthetic shift may or may not have emerged through composer’s growing interest in environmental issues, hence his decision to give his concerto a title reflecting (pun intended) a natural phenomenon.
For all of its uninterrupted extended duration, the concerto readily lends itself to the focus of the attentive listener. One can appreciate an underlying “movement structure” through which the composer explores a broad diversity of rhetorical stances. At the same time one easily marvels at the technical challenges, not only in the cadenza work but also in the “textural background” assigned to the soloist when the ensemble is unfolding the thematic material.
Marwood’s approach to the solo work was technically awe-inspiring and rhetorically focused. Indeed, his focus was so intense that there were times (many I am afraid) when it seemed as if he had lost touch with his “other job” of leading the ensemble. Fortunately, at those times Associate Concertmaster Dawn Harms admirably (and unobtrusively) took on the responsibility of guiding the ensemble in and out of the twists and turns unfolded by the soloist.
Marwood also performed as soloist in the opening work on the program, Sally Beamish’s “Seavaigers.” This time he shared solo duties with accordionist James Crabb. Like “Tālā Gaisma,” “Seavaigers” reflects a strong interest in the natural world, particularly that of the sea. It consists of three movements entitled, respectively, “Storm,” “Lament,” and “Haven,” suggesting a relationship between mere mortals and natural forces they cannot control.
Sadly, Beamish’s rhetorical skills were not quite up to the implications of her overall plan. I cannot recall when I have heard a jollier approach to the musical depiction of a storm; and I could not, for the life of me, fathom why the prevailing mood was so upbeat. Indeed, over the course of the entire composition, there was a sense that both thematic and rhetorical scope were unduly impoverished. Thus, the “main attraction” of the performance came down to the give-and-take between Marwood’s violin and Crabb’s accordion. Both of them were decidedly up to the task, and there is a good chance that some improvisation was involved. However, the overall experience was that the music was a box of raisin bran with too few raisins in it.
Nevertheless, there was a sense that last night’s performance was trying to do justice to the score. Sadly, the same could not be said of the following selection, which concluded the first half of the program, Antonín Dvořák's Opus 22 serenade in E major for strings. This is music in which the composer’s sensitivity to texture is as finely honed as his capacity to invent imaginative thematic material reinforced through expressive harmonic progressions. Too much of the execution (led by Marwood in the Concertmaster’s chair) was unduly muddled, undermining all the qualities that can make this score a source for delightfully absorbing listening. Perhaps so much time when into preparing the ensemble for its role in supporting Marwood’s solo work that little time was left to get them up to snuff as an ensemble unto itself.
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