Shunske Sato with his violin (from the PBO event page for last night’s performance)
Last night in Herbst Theatre, violinist Shunske Sato led the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (PBO) in the final program of its 2025/26 season. The title of that program was Kinks and Quirks and, over the course of the evening, it became apparent it was served with a rhetoric that was more annoying than engaging. Sato performed on his violin throughout the program, but his instrument never managed to yield satisfying intonation while the full ensemble was clearly taking care of themselves.
The selections accounted for a prodigious spread of music history with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach at one end the Felix Mendelssohn at the other. The latter was represented by his MWV O 3 concerto for violin and strings in D minor. The low number identifies this as a very early work, and the composer completed it at the age of thirteen. Unfortunately, Sato’s intonation never managed to fit in with the ensemble work, making the listening experience a frustrating one.
Indeed, frustration was the order of the evening. The excerpts of the K. 345 music Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed for Baron Tobias Philipp von Gebler’s Masonic drama Thamos, König in Ägypten were given a brutal account under Sato’s leadership. Just as disappointing was the Bach selection, his H 665 (Wq 183:3), the first in a set of four symphonies given the collective title Orchester-Sinfonien mit zwölf obligaten Stimmen. At the other end of the evening, the program concluded with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 21, his first symphony composed in the key of C major. This was the clearest account of the evening, but the performance was still undermined by the liberties Sato took with tempo.
To be fair, the program was true to its name, almost warning the attentive listener not to expect a substantive listening experience.
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