Baroque Gets a Brutal Beating from NCCO

Last night in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, the New Century Chamber Orchestra (NCCO) presented its “seasonal” concert, Christmas with Anne Sofie von Otter. Mezzo von Otter joined the NCCO strings, led from the Concertmaster’s position by Daniel Hope, for a generous share of sacred, secular, and popular selections. On its own the ensemble focused entirely on three Baroque masters, George Frideric Handel, Antonio Vivaldi, and Arcangelo Corelli. For her selections from the Baroque period, von Otter turned to Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach (both born in the same year).

Sadly, the high point of the evening involved the fewest number of NCCO musicians. Von Otter sang the very first aria in Bach’s BWV 248 Christmas Oratorio, “Bereite dich, Zion, mit zärtlichen Trieben” (prepare thyself, Zion, with tender care), scored only for one oboe d’amore, violins, and continuo. The program notes by Peter Laki suggested that the audience would hear the oboe d’amore, but it simply adds color to the first violin part. As a result, von Otter was accompanied by Hope on violin and a continuo of Zhou Yi on cello and Derek Tam on harpsichord. They provided just the right sort of intimacy that would suit the celebration of the First Day of Christmas in Leipzig.

The Bach aria was coupled with the aria “Vedrò con mio diletto” (I will see with my delight) from Vivaldi’s opera Giustino (loosely based on the life of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great). This did not fare as well, primarily because the full NCCO string ensemble never seemed to be firing on all cylinders. The clarity of von Otter’s diction was poorly served by accompaniment whose articulation never managed to elevate beyond the mushy and whose intonation left more than a little to be desired. These flaws were all the more evident when the ensemble was not accompanying von Otter, most notably in highly disappointing accounts of the concerti grossi by both Handel (Opus 6, Number 10, in D minor) and Corelli (Opus 6, Number 8, in G minor).

Things were marginally better when the group accompanied the more popular side of von Otter’s repertoire. She began with Erik Arvinder’s arrangement of Per-Erik Moraeus’ song “Koppången,” named after a nature reserve in Central Sweden. This was given acceptable accompaniment, although the intensity of the text being sung, written by Py Bäckman, tended to relegate the music itself to background status.

The more traditional offerings, on the other hand, labored under uncredited arrangements that were, for the most part, consistently syrupy. One wishes that Anthony Manzo had been allowed a bit more liberty to take a bass solo in the rendition of Thad Jones’ “A Child Is Born.” Instead, that song, like the three others, had to slog through an instrumental repetition of von Otter’s vocal account of each song. Apparently, the inadequacies that hobbled Simone Dinnerstein’s guest appearance with NCCO last month seem to have become the rule, rather than the exception.