Carneiro’s exuberant return
Berkeley Symphony music director back after a year
It’s been a long and lonely year for the Berkeley Symphony, as Music Director Joana Carneiro absented herself for the arduous and glorious task of giving birth to triplets. But she was back on the stage of Zellerbach Hall on Thursday night to open the orchestra’s new season, and the exuberant results served as a reminder of just how badly she’d been missed.
The concert featured a characteristically canny bit of programming, combining standard and standard-ish repertoire (Beethoven, some out-of-theway Shostakovich) with recent works by composers both well known and not. And for a conductor and orchestra who don’t get to spend nearly enough time together — Carneiro swoops in to prepare each concert program with maximal efficiency — this is an artistic relationship that seems to grow deeper and more responsive season after season.
That’s not to deny the evidence that a year apart has taken its toll — the opening
rendition of Beethoven’s First Symphony, in particular, was full of interesting interpretive ideas that didn’t always come off with complete precision. But the bobbles and occasional moments of uncertainty were nothing compared to the infectious energy that Carneiro brought to the proceedings, or the sense that the orchestra had once again gotten its groove back.
Those impressions came through most starkly and delightfully in the closing rendition of John Adams’ motoric orchestral showpiece “Fearful Symmetries.” Listeners with a sufficiently long memory can recall a time when this 1988 work was a staple of the composer’s catalog, before the more diverse and ambitious works of the ensuing decades elbowed it aside.
But to encounter it again in Carneiro’s sleek, jazzy account was to marvel anew at its wit and vitality, and also at the virtuosity with which Adams both pursued and undercut the monomania of this project.
Like some kind of Minimalist “Boléro,” “Fearful Symmetries” is a work in which nothing really happens, except that it happens in countless ways and in seemingly infinite gradations. The basic chugging rhythms that are established in the opening pages run through the work’s entire 30-minute duration — always constant, always shifting in emphasis and color.
Carneiro, conducting as much with her hips as with her baton, caught the music’s loose-limbed allure perfectly. There was enough metric crispness in the performance to impart the relevant mechanistic gleam, but also enough freedom to keep things from becoming oppressive. It was splendid.
Adams’ fingerprints were also present, though at a certain remove, in the world premiere of William Gardiner’s Cello Concerto, commissioned by the Pacific Harmony Foundation (the project that Adams oversees with his wife, photographer Deborah O’Grady). Written for the dynamic young Berkeley-born cellist Tessa Seymour, this is a 16-minute work whose two movements cover a fair bit of ground while maintaining a tight expressive focus.
In the first and more effective movement, “A Drop,” Gardiner creates a subtle sound world out of a few initial scattered gestures — the ominous ticktock of a wood block, some pizzicato gestures from the soloist, a few buzzing melodic flurries.
Then, with the wood block keeping an off-beat pulse throughout, the landscape comes more plainly into view, like a Polaroid picture (ask your granddad). A minor-key tonality emerges from latency, and the taut melodic snippets expand into full-voiced, almost rhapsodic lines. The influence of Gardiner’s fellow Australian, the late Peter Sculthorpe, is evident in the music’s dryeyed but fearless sentimentality.
A second movement, titled “Ritornello,” was less certain in its direction, and ended abruptly with an orchestral outburst that sounded like everyone getting run over by a bus for no reason. Still, Seymour gave the piece a forceful, expert performance, and followed it up with an encore (unidentified, alas) of “Lamentatio” by Giovanni Sollima.
As a delectable palettecleanser at the midpoint, Carneiro led a performance of Shostakovich’s tart little Jazz Suite No. 1, giving it a knowing, languorous sensuality. This is the kind of thing she does expertly; it’s good to have her back in the saddle.