At last, audience gets its reward
Most of the time, a concert encore serves as an entertaining bauble, a way to extend the pleasures of a successful event and provide a little thanks to the audience. The superbly played encores by Debussy and Bizet that were appended to Saturday’s Berkeley concert by Kent Nagano and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra served a far more serious purpose.
They were there, it seemed, to finally show the audience what these musicians are capable of — silky instrumental textures, eloquent phrasing and bright, alert rhythmic mastery. They also came as some sort of reassurance that the previous two hours of unexciting, blandly capable orchestral playing were some kind of a fluke.
That’s good to know, I suppose. But it was a long wait to get the message.
For local audiences, there was a nostalgic satisfaction in seeing Nagano once again prowling the stage of Zellerbach Hall, where he served so many years as music director of the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra. And this touring engagement, presented by Cal Performances, was a chance to hear what he’s been able to achieve over the past decade in Montreal, with an ensemble that had been through a rough patch in its history just before he arrived.
But the best one can say after Saturday’s concert is that the orchestra is beset by inconsistency. The rendition of Debussy’s “Prelude to the Af- ternoon of a Faun” that served as the first encore would have been the envy of many a more eminent ensemble. It was shimmery and lithe, bathed in diaphanous colors but built on the firm infrastructure that is so essential to the composer’s palette.
And the “Farandole” from Bizet’s “L’Arlésienne,” a more traditional sort of encore, found the orchestra mustering a degree of incisive clarity that had been largely absent up to that point. If those two selections had been more representative, the con- cert would have registered as something of a triumph.
Instead, the main body of the program found the orchestra delivering without grievous mishaps — aside from an equipment malfunction among the woodwinds that caused Nagano to restart Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” after just a few measures — but also without much personality or vibrancy. Rhythms were often lax, and instrumental colorings, which were central to much of the evening’s repertoire, sounded blunt and lumpy.
In the “Rite,” for example, Nagano seemed intent on compensating with sheer force for a shortage of detailed precision ( the piece’s scattershot final chord was only the most telling example), and although some of the big banks of orchestral sound made an impressive effect, there was a general air of bluster about the proceedings. Debussy’s “Jeux,” which opened the program, sounded beguiling but interpretively glib.
In between came a ferocious and charmless account of Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, with Daniil Trifonov tromping through the solo part in wearying, brutalist fashion. Trifonov put his formidable keyboard virtuosity to better use in Rachmaninoff ’s dense and vivacious arrangement of the Prelude from Bach’s E- Major Violin Partita — an apt development on an evening when all the finest rewards came during the encores.