Pasa Reviews Santa Fe Pro Musica Orchestra; Severall Friends

Santa Fe Pro Musica Orchestra Lensic Performing Arts Center, April 29 Severall Friends San Miguel Chapel, April 28

David Felberg, a violinist in the Santa Fe Pro Musica Orchestra, moved to the podium to lead the ensemble in the final concert of its season. Mozart opened and closed the program, beginning with the Prague Symphony, rendered in an unfussy interpretation most notable for its rhythmic élan. Felberg took the middle movement at a quick clip; if it indeed qualified as an Andante (a “walking tempo”), as Mozart marked it, it was decidedly a stroll with a goal. He defined the character of themes clearly and instilled well-negotiated dynamic subtleties. Balances among instrumental groups could sound a bit awry, and the finale was not as tightly rendered as the rest, but it was an enjoyable performance.

At the end of the concert, Benjamin Hochman was the soloist in Mozart’s A-major Piano Concerto (K.414). There is more to this piece than Hochman let on. He played with unvaryingly pretty tone, legato touch, and cumulative blandness. He paced the cadenzas with little drama. The slow movement, which Mozart wrote as a tribute to his recently departed idol Johann Christian Bach, was homogenized such that phrases meandered arbitrarily. Nowhere did one glimpse the depth Olivier Messiaen felt when he described this movement as “one of the most noble and beautiful chapters our author ever wrote … [in which] one thinks of the great religious meditations of the Ave

Verum and of the Magic Flute.” The orchestra provided nuanced support, but Hochman was too self-effacing for the piece to make an impression.

Far more bracing was Stravinsky’s Octet for flute, clarinet, and pairs of bassoons, trumpets, and trombones. Though a work of chamber music, the Octet is led by a conductor more often than not. Felberg traced its tricky rhythms with unerring clarity, eliciting the sort of objective, unsentimental reading the composer asked for. Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres), a 2013 work by Missy Mazzoli, made for pleasant listening, an exercise in timbre and texture that might have been plucked from a Star Wars score. Shrewd percussion scoring enhanced its cosmic flavor, including some input from the lion’s roar, a drum with a cord drawn through its head to make a sound that justifies its name.

AT San Miguel Chapel the night before, Severall Friends, the local early-music group that digs deep into pockets of repertoire from the Baroque and before, offered a delightfully unbuttoned evening of popular ballads from Shakespeare’s day. In fact, all of the pieces on the program figured in, or were alluded to, in the Bard’s plays. Tenor/countertenor Drew Minter, fiddle-player Shira Kammen, cittern-player Mark Rimple (assisting as a vocalist), and viola da gambist Mary Springfels presented more than a dozen ballads. Most were sung, but some were given in detailed instrumental elaborations, in which the players dexterously navigated quirky harmonies and rhythms. Some pieces were lusty indeed; the saints populating the reredos of the San Miguel Chapel would probably have averted their eyes and stopped their ears if they could have.

The evening’s jaw-dropper was “Titus Andronicus’ Complaint,” a 10-minute solo sung by Minter (to the ballad-tune “Fortune My Foe”) in epic style — sort of like an Elizabethan Beowulf. Kammen accompanied in folk-fiddle style, illustrating the text with bits of melodic figuration, cleverly interpolating the Renaissance song “Flow My Tears” at a particularly poignant moment. Shakespeare’s play on the subject is a famous gore-fest, and Minter related the high points with gusto, including descriptions of several punitive amputations and, best of all, the grinding of royal enemies’ bones into a pie crust in which their flesh might be baked and then served to their empress mother. Not less marvelous was Minter’s immaculately enunciated rendition of “Sir Eglamore” — “that valiant knight/With his fa, la, lanky down dilly” — who slew a dragon: “In at his mouth his sword he sent/The hilt appear’d at his fundament.” A concertgoer would not often hear “Three Blind Mice” as an encore, but here it proved perfect as a final fillip. — James M. Keller