OFS Launches 10th Season with All-Strings

Last night at Heron Arts, One Found Sound (OFS), the orchestra that performs without a conductor, began its tenth anniversary season. The title of the entire season is simply x, and the title of last night’s program was dream. However, there was a last-minute change in programming; and all four works on that program were performed entirely by the string section.

The only originally-planned offering was the final one, Béla Bartók’s divertimento for string ensemble, which was completed in 1939. It was preceded by Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1048, the third of his “Brandenburg” concertos, composed in the key of G major. The first half of the program, on the other hand, presented two contrasting offerings, both of which departed from the usual White European Male composers.

Thomas Gainsborough’s 1768 portrait of Ignatius Sancho (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The first of these was Ignatius Sancho. He spent eighteen years as a slave in England, after which he ran away from his household. Through his own efforts he accumulated a diversity of talents, one of which was a capacity for creating dance tunes. OFS began their program with a suite of those tunes in an arrangement prepared by Nicola Saraceni Canzano. This was followed by “Ancient Echo,” one of the two Chinese Paintings works composed by Wu Man for pipa. That composition was rescored for strings by Danny Clay.

The first half of the program thus emerged as an engaging journey of discovery, not just of the music but also of Sancho’s progress from slave to polymath. The second half, on the other hand, drew upon familiar resources that provided for not only engaging ensemble work but a wide diversity of different combinations of solo work. When Bartók sat down at a piano keyboard, he was as likely to play Bach’s music as he was to present his own. Thus, an all-strings account of Bach emerged as an engaging introduction to Bartók’s approach to working with the same resources. Nevertheless, Bartók took the lead with a wide diversity of rhetorical dispositions, including one particularly prankish gesture that teases the listener just before the coda of the final movement.