Ensemble plays on shared direction
The wordless interactions that take place between a conductor and an orchestra are a wonderful form of interpretive alchemy, but they’re not the only possible way to musical success. There are actually a variety of ways that a musical ensemble can delegate or share leadership, and several of them were on display over the weekend during the vividly satisfying Berkeley visit by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.
During its concerts on Saturday, Feb. 10, and Sunday, Feb. 11, in Zellerbach Hall — the last two installments of a whirlwind three-concert visit sponsored by Cal
Performances — the ensemble played both with a conductor (Joshua Weilerstein) and on its own, acting as a sort of souped-up string quartet. It took direction sometimes from the podium, sometimes from the concertmaster’s chair, and sometimes ostensibly from the piano soloist, Jonathan Biss.
But wherever the downbeat was coming from, the results were spot-on — and even more notably, they gave evidence of a crackerjack instrumental ensemble that can work together as a single tightly knit entity. Time and again over the course of the two programs, you could hear rhythmic currents and interpretive decisions passing organically among the orchestra members, like some sort of galvanic current.
Those pulses were perhaps most notably evident in the works from the standard repertoire that served as openers. Haydn’s Symphony No. 49, “La Passione,” got a dark, subtly shaded reading at the start of Saturday night’s concert, one that laid an emphasis on the work’s communal aspects.
And Sunday’s matinee got under way with a performance of Ravel’s “Le tombeau de Couperin” that shone a tender light on the composer’s most ingratiating strains. From the lovely, burbling vivacity of the opening “Prélude” through the jaunty rhythms of the final “Rigaudon,” the players made everything sound fresh and almost improvisatory in its spontaneity.
There was a similar freshness in its rendition of George Tsontakis’ “O Mikros, O Megas” (“The Small World, the Huge World”), which occupied the center spot on Sunday. Commissioned two years ago for the orchestra, this was a fourmovement rhapsody on nature, running about 25 minutes, that seemed designed to bring out the players’ most responsive impulses.
Tsontakis writes in a gently accessible idiom that is always pleasant, if not always particularly stirring. This piece proved most enchanting in the second movement, “Shadows (Lullaby)” — built on a rocking three-note figure that ranges from bass line to thematic material to ornamental filigree and back again — and in the final moments, which close out the piece on a gorgeous meditative fade.
Tsontakis’ piece seemed tailor-made for conductor-free performance, but Weilerstein was on hand on Saturday to lead Biss and the orchestra in Salvatore Sciarrino’s oddball piano concerto “Il sogno di Stradella” (“The Dream of Stradella”). Premiered last year, this cast melodic echoes of the 17th century composer Antonio Stradella in the form of a wistful waltz a la Satie, and framed it with matching episodes of disembodied instrumental skittering. The effect was inconclusive at best.
The main focus of Biss’ activity, though, was a series of Beethoven concertos — the Fourth on Saturday and the Fifth (“Emperor”) on Sunday. (He also played the Second on Friday, along with Timo Andres’ concerto “The Blind Banister.”)
The Fourth, in a nifty programming coup, was preceded without pause by Ives’ “Unanswered Question,” which seemed to suggest that Beethoven’s music was in fact the answer. Biss and Weilerstein collaborated on a rendition whose sturdy reliability underscored the point.
But the “Emperor” found Biss in an even more spirited and dramatic vein. He was billed in the program as the “director,” but he plainly had his hands full with the solo part, and leadership was quite obviously coming from concertmaster Steven Copes. That made for a splendid division of duties, and Biss’ luminous and expressive encore, “The Poet Speaks” from Schumann’s “Kinderszenen,” was a welcome reminder of his mastery of that composer’s music.