Tchaikovsky and Orff: Carolyn Kuan, cond., Joan Kwuon, violin, Maureen McKay, soprano, Stanford Olsen, tenor, Lucas Meachem, baritone, Northwest Boychoir, Seattle Symphony Chorale, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 13/7/2006 (BJ)

Dismissive reviews not being what I enjoy writing, my first impulse was to grant a pass to this concert and not write about it at all. But then it occurred to me that, since every concert really should be viewed against the background of musical life as a whole, omitting comment on this occasion would be unfair to another performance of the main work, Orff’s Carmina Burana, that I reviewed in these columns almost exactly twelve months ago. On that occasion, Elizabeth Stoyanovich led her Bremerton Symphony Orchestra and various vocal resources in a performance that brimmed over with vitality, humor, and lyrical grace, while rising far above the level of technical excellence that you might normally expect from an amateur orchestra.

Orff’s work is not one that I should expect to hear with pleasure more often than, say, once every year or two. Nevertheless, good judges have spoken to me warmly about the talents of Carolyn Kuan, the Seattle Symphony’s assistant conductor, so I went to this concert with high expectations. Perhaps it was a natural reaction after the excitement of Mahler’s Third Symphony, played at the season’s final subscription concerts a week earlier; perhaps, as tends to be the case for special concerts of this kind, the rehearsal schedule gave her insufficient time for really meticulous preparation. Whatever the cause, in any case, the performances she led of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and of Carmina Burana provided little to enthuse about. There were some graceful woodwind solos to be heard in both works, and both Lucas Meachem and Stanford Olsen fulfilled their solo responsibilities in the Orff with panache. But the generally approximate orchestral and choral balances took much of the bloom off Orff’s textures, rhythms tended just to gallop along without any real sense of direction, and there was hardly a trace of the sheer bounce and élan that distinguished the Bremerton performance last year, on which I now look back with even more admiration than I felt at the time. What with a no less vaguely balanced orchestral contribution to the Tchaikovsky (in which Joan Kwuon played the solo part with woefully imprecise intonation), this Seattle concert as a whole left me unconvinced–but at the same time eager to give Ms. Kuan the benefit of the doubt. I look forward to hearing her conduct in more favorable circumstances some time soon.

Bernard Jacobson