Dueling concertos at New Century
Even after more than three centuries of hard use, the concerto retains its power to fascinate both composers and listeners. Even with plenty of tinkering and revisionism, the central drama of one voice and many — whether in opposition or collaboration — still works its magic.
The reasons why that should be so came intermittently into focus during the season-opening concert by the New Century Chamber Orchestra, which wound up a four-performance run on Sunday, Nov 4, at the Osher Marin Jewish Community Center in San Rafael. With the British violinist Anthony Marwood serving as concertmaster and guest soloist, the orchestra served up a pair of recent works for violin and chamber orchestra — one of them, by the British composer Sally Beamish, featuring an impressive cameo by the accordion virtuoso James Crabb.
Yet accordion pyrotechnics notwithstanding, the gem of the program was “Distant Light,” a 1997 violin concerto by the too-littleknown Latvian composer Peteris Vasks. Vasks’ writing proved soulful, elegant and wonderfully elusive, and Marwood — a player of warmth and understated charm — turned out to be an ideal interpreter.
“Distant Light” unfolds over an uninterrupted 30 minutes, but within that stretch are four or five movements so distinctive and sharply differentiated that they might as well have been indicated as such in the program. The music is conjured out of a misty nowhere from a violin played so high that notes don’t even register as such, and it returns to that void at the end with a pleasing click of symmetry.
In between come a series of engaging and often beautiful musical essays — first a longbreathed melody that coalesces out of the concerto’s opening pages, then a more rhythmically regular but equally rhapsodic chapter followed by a vivid minor-key scherzo. Each movement is punctuated by a solo cadenza that gives the violin a chance to ruminate on everything we’ve just heard; there are virtuoso challenges as well, but they’re not the point of the exercise in any obvious way.
What was most striking about Vasks’ score was unfussy subtlety with which its component parts are blended — a moody harmonic palette that encompasses everything in evocative gray light, a vein of folk music that never sentimentalizes its sources, and a willingness to become craggy and abstract when the moment demands. The dark-hued directness of Marwood’s playing only emphasized the music’s allure.
Beamish’s “Seavaigers,” which opened the program, had far less of interest to offer. A pictorial evocation of Scotland’s coastal landscape, the piece was originally written for Shetland fiddle and Scottish harp, and only recently arranged for violin and accordion. There are three movements, each built around a thin idea that is brutally overworked — a two-measure snatch of shantyish melody in the first movement, a handful of ostinato rhythms in the finale.
The slow middle movement seems to emerge, promisingly, out of the seaborne fog, but once the air is cleared it consists of a few drab instrumental cantillations, again repeated beyond their merits. Marwood and Crabb gave the music their all, to little avail.
Set between the two concertos, the orchestra’s sweet-tempered and stylish account of Dvorák’s Serenade for Strings, Op. 22, felt like a model of communal endeavor.