SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Wagner, Jones, and Dvořák: Gerard Schwarz, cond., John Cerminaro, horn, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 16.2.2008 (BJ)


Gerard Schwarz’s tireless enthusiasm for new music was evidenced once again with the world premiere of a commissioned work by  Samuel Jones, who has been the Seattle Symphony’s composer in residence for the past decade. Jones, who was born in Mississippi in 1935, made his most recent previous contribution with a tuba concerto, premiered two years ago. That was a fluent, original, and enjoyable piece, so it was natural that this latest commission (the first fruit of the Seattle Commissioning Club, an admirable collaboration set up by several Seattle couples) should be for a piece expanding the repertoire of the horn.

In John Cerminaro the orchestra possesses as fine an occupant of the principal horn chair as any orchestra in the world can lay claim to. The performance I heard (two days after the actual premiere) demonstrated his special gifts to perfection. Cerminaro is a poet of his instrument, not a cowboy, and the seemingly infinite range of tonal nuance he commands was ideally summoned up by Jones’s Horn Concerto. The work stresses intimacy and lyricism rather than the horn’s more extrovert qualities, though without failing to give even this masterly player a testing work-out in terms of technical difficulty; it is, after all, in deploying sustained tones at the quieter end of the dynamic spectrum that a horn-player meets his most revealing challenge.

Jones’s three movements, totaling a duration of about 27 minutes, are indeed predominantly slow in tempo, with flashes of rapidity, mostly in the finale, often coming quite unexpectedly but effectively to rest. Instead of contrasting speeds, it is an imaginative range of contrasting gesture that the composer has used to secure variety of utterance. In a couple of passages, he has had the notion of using a pair of offstage horns to echo the soloist’s phrases. He uses this quasi-Mahlerian resource in a way refreshingly his own, and the moment when two members of the orchestra’s horn section made their appearance at either side of the organ loft was a telling touch of theater. Harmonically, the concerto’s essentially diatonic language, at times evoking birdsong and conjuring up imaginary mountain-scapes, eschews any kind of outlandish atonalism. This, if you come to think of it, is surely inevitable in any music convincingly written for an instrument whose entire playing pattern depends on the notes that constitute the harmonic series. Of course, if you think a bit more, taking into account the fact that the strings of an orchestra’s largest sections are also harmonically and melodically related in fifths and exploit the overtones of the harmonic series, you may find it hard to avoid the conclusion–suggested by, among others, Ernest Ansermet in his controversial study of The Foundations of Music in the Human Consciousness, that such techniques as the dodecaphonic method pioneered by Schoenberg inherently make for the distortion of an orchestra’s natural manner of expression.

However that may be, this particular orchestra, on this particular occasion, played its role in the predominantly tonal proceedings in a manner that supported Cerminaro brilliantly, and Schwarz’s commitment and meticulous preparation were evident in every line of the music. The program had begun with three vividly played excerpts from Act III of Wagner’s Masteringers, and it ended with a performance of DvoÍák’s New World Symphony that would, in a program without a world premiere to claim principal attention, have demanded a detailed and enthusiastic critical accounting. Suffice it to say that Schwarz and his orchestra were most commandingly in the vein, and his interpretation, at once sensitive and athletic, served the music’s strength and integrity without ever degenerating into sentimentalism or mere bluster. Most magical of all was the famous slow movement, which had an irresistible depth and flow, highlighted by Stefan Farkas’s bewitching english-horn solo.

Bernard Jacobson

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