Marc Schachman with his oboe (courtesy of PBO)
The high point of last night’s performance by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (PBO) in Herbst Theatre was the “farewell” offering by oboist Marc Schachman, who played the second concerto, in the key of D minor, in Tomaso Albinoni’s Opus 9 collection. This is music I first encountered as a student on one of the Musical Heritage Society albums that I acquired, and the music has remained in memory ever since then. Listening to it performed made for a delightful encounter between past and present.
Schachman played from the conductor’s position, but the ensemble was led from the Concertmaster’s chair by Elizabeth Blumenstock. This was very much a matter of friends gathering to bid a fond farewell to one of their own. The overall rhetoric of the music was upbeat, even in the interpretation of the Adagio movement.
Where period instruments are involved, the wind section tends to have the greatest challenges with intonation. (Schachman’s instrument was made in 2001, following the model of an instrument that originated in England in the early eighteenth century.) The intonation of his solo work was consistently on the money, providing just the right contrast for exchanges with the accompanying string ensemble.
The bad news is that Schachman’s performance turned out to be the only satisfying portion of the program, the rest of which had been prepared and was conducted by Skip Sempé. That program amounted to assorted selections from the works of Jean-Baptiste Lully, Henry Purcell, Marin Marais, and François Couperin. As a leader, Sempé tended to be a minimalist when it came to communicating with the ensemble through posture and gesture.
As the designer of the program, his selections tended to favor different approaches to variation, with particular attention to the passacaglia and chaconne dance forms. Sadly, those dance movements seem to have been conceived for those wishing the dance for extreme durations of time. As individual variations would play out on the opening them, it did not take long for one to wonder whether any of the contributing composers knew the adage, “Enough is enough!” Sempé’s leadership never managed to home in on an overall framework that would leave the attentive listener with some sense of a journey well taken. Rather, it was all “one damned thing after another,” as if the “historical” performance was paying homage to Winston Churchill’s jaundiced definition of history.
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