SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Handel, Vivaldi, and H. Casadesus:   Alexander Lipay, flute, Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola, Christopher Seaman, cond., Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 20.10. 2007 (BJ)

Three of the four works on this program lived up to their billing as part of the Seattle Symphony’s “Basically Baroque” series. Two of them, Vivaldi’s G-major Flute Concerto and Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, were performed in more or less “authentic” form, whatever that tendentious adjective may mean, though on modern instruments.

Handel’s Water Music, on the other hand, opened the evening in an edition by the conductor, Christopher Seaman, that somehow managed to leave out several of my favorite movements, including no fewer than three of Handel’s wonderfully spirited minuets. I sympathize with Steven Lowe, who, when he wrote the program notes, had evidently not been warned of another omission, that of the overture–a perhaps even more curious decision on the conductor/editor’s part.

As to those modern instruments, the Seattle Opera production of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride demonstrated as recently as last week that, played with appropriate care for baroque or early classical style, they can produce an entirely acceptable result. But on this occasion there seemed to have been little care taken to arrive at a stylistically consistent playing technique: from one desk to another, there was a wide variety in the application of vibrato by the string players, and this contributed to the generally clotted textures that bedeviled the first half of the concert. Nor did the soloist’s contribution to the Vivaldi concerto, help much. Alexander Lipay, a young flutist of origins undivulged by the program biography–I wish those documents would tell us at least where people were born–embellished the brief slow movement attractively, but his playing was beset by fallible intonation and frequent, seemingly inadvertent, changes of tone-color.

The orchestral sound had come more satisfactorily together in time for the Fireworks music, and this brought the concert to a suitably rousing conclusion, though Seaman’s tempo for the final pair of minuets was unregenerately 19th-century-ish in its stilted pomposity. But at any rate Handel cleansed the ear splendidly after the visitant from another world that had begun the second half of the program. This was a C-minor Viola Concerto by that old fraud Henri Casadesus. Born in 1879, the viola-playing member of the Casadesus family passed off several of his own attempts at composition under the names of well-known 18th-century composers, along lines similar to the practice of Fritz Kreisler, but with much less skill.

In this case the doubtful recipient of the honor Johann Christian Bach, who lived a century and a half earlier, and who, if he took my advice, would sue for defamation of musical character. The most amazing thing about this particular concerto, which also exists in a cello version, is that anyone could have believed in J.C. Bach’s authorship for two minutes, or even for ten seconds, given the totally sub-romantic orchestral and solo writing, and an inappropriateness of musical gesture that rises (?) at times to the level of the purely comic.

For all that, it was a pleasure to hear Susan Gulkis Assadi draw every ounce of spurious emotion from her chosen vehicle. The Seattle Symphony’s principal violist is an artist of the highest caliber, and she lavished all her resources of honeyed tone and eloquent phrasing on Casadesus’s jeu of little esprit. I do think, though, that the piece ought to have been listed in the program under its correct attribution, rather than being left to traduce Christian Bach in the minds of unobservant readers. And now let us hear Ms. Gulkis Assadi, soon, in some music worthy of her.