SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Handel, A. Marcello, J.C. Bach, and Rameau: Gary Thor Wedow, cond, Ben Hausmann, oboe, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 11.1.2008 (BJ)


After enjoying Gary Thor Wedow’s conducting in two Seattle Opera productions in the past year or so (Giulio Cesare and Iphigénie en Tauride), I was disappointed for find him much less convincing in this concert engagement, which he took over from the previously announced Bernard Labadie for unannounced reasons. His ability to draw clean, vibrato-less playing, and thus some genuinely baroque sonorities, from orchestral strings remained impressive, but in other respects the Seattle Symphony was not to be heard at anything like its best.

It may be that Wedow shows more physical restraint in the confines of the opera-house pit. On the concert platform, at any rate, his highly uneconomical gestural technique served only to make ensemble a bit of a problem. He must have been very hard for the players to follow, since almost every beat of his baton-less right hand was mirrored by the left hand, in a fairly extreme example of what Adrian Boult used to call “the Grecian-vase effect.” The tactic was especially distracting in the frequent thrusting accents of Johann Christian Bach’s G-minor Sinfonia (marking them with both hands inevitably made them, if still dramatic, not absolutely unanimous), and it is the kind of method that makes it particularly difficult to get an orchestra to start a movement exactly together.

Perhaps this consideration lay at the root of other weaknesses, not just in the Christian Bach but throughout the program, though certainly other annoyances obtruded themselves. Handel’s F-major Concerto grosso, Op. 6 No. 9, is an exhilaratingly tuneful piece, but on this occasion the tunes were scarcely even audible, which may have been simply a problem of balance; but the cluttered textures may also have resulted from the use of a rather too large body of strings. Then there was the lack of effective dynamic contrast through most of the evening. Baroque music employs clear distinctions between loud and soft: after the effectively hushed opening of the Handel, this concert instead proceeded almost unrelievedly at the loud and rather-loud levels, and this vitiated the effect of principal oboist Ben Hausmann’s polished delivery of the solo part in Alessandro Marcello’s C-minor Concerto for his instrument.

The most serious flaw of all, however, is one that cannot be laid at Wedow’s door. The programming itself, presumably agreed collaboratively by the orchestra’s artistic direction with the originally engaged conductor, was incomprehensible, in that the Marcello and Bach works, as well as the voluminous suite from Rameau’s Dardanus that supplied the concert’s entire second half, made up 22 movements set with few exceptions in minor keys. Attractive as many of those movements were, and superficially varied as were their tempos and rhythms, the prevalence of the minor mode resulted by the end of the evening in a wearying sameness of expressive tone. It seemed quite perverse, in the case of Christian Bach, to have chosen a composer noted for his sunny grace and freedom from his brother Emanuel’s penchant for dark drama, and then to have hit on one of the most uncharacteristically histrionic and somber of his works. Baroque music can indeed be dramatic, rhetorical, hag-ridden, what you will. But it can also –let me assure anyone unfamiliar with it who found this a depressing evening–be a lot more fun.

Bernard Jacobson
 

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