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Handel, Vivaldi, Respighi and Bach:  Gerard Schwarz, cond., Elisa Barston, violin, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 17.10.2008 (BJ)


Music from the 18th and the two previous centuries made up this pleasantly undemanding and no less pleasantly undoctrinaire program in the Seattle Symphony’s “Basically Baroque” series. It was undoctrinaire in the sense that original scores were presented beside pieces orchestrated years after their creation by 20th- and 21st-century arrangers.

Except insofar as we always hear music through the filter of the performer’s personality and musicianship, the first half of the concert offered direct encounters with works by Handel and Vivaldi. Music director Gerard Schwarz gave Handel’s Concerto grosso in G minor, Op. 6 No. 6, a performance combining rhythmic vitality with a richness of tone–on modern instruments–that an ascetically inclined purist might have found excessive, but that I thoroughly enjoyed. There are more ways than one to skin a cat, or to perform old music, and Schwarz’s way with the latter activity falls well short of exceeding the bounds of good taste.

Next came two Vivaldi violin concertos that neither I, nor I suspect most members of the audience, could recall ever having heard before–RV 217 in D major and RV 331 in G minor. Without emulating the tunefulness of better-known Vivaldi works, they both provide plenty of musical sustenance, especially in performances as skillful and committed as those provided by the orchestra’s gifted principal second violin, Elisa Barston. Again, the tone she drew from her instrument (made in the 18th century by Carlo Ferdinando Landolfi of Milan) achieved a lustrous opulence far removed from period-instrument austerity, and the result, enhanced by her incisive phrasing and musical acumen, was fresh and satisfying.

After intermission a further filter–the arranger’s prism–was interposed between original creations and contemporary listeners, illuminating rather than distorting the music in the process. This was my first encounter with Respighi’s orchestrations of three Bach chorale preludes: Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland; Meine Seele erhebt den Herren; and Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme. They are really fine arrangements, especially the first, which clothes the tune in a quite wonderful web of dark orchestral sonorities. Here as throughout the evening the orchestra, with several guests filling in for principals who were away to perform in the Seattle Opera’s Elektra production, nevertheless played with all its accustomed polish and expressive warmth.

Respighi’s much more familiar Suite No. 1 of Ancient Airs and Dances followed: arrangements of pieces by Simone Molinaro, Vincenzo Galilei (father of the astronomer), and two anonymous renaissance composers. Respighi is a seriously underrated master, perhaps because the sheer sonic splendor of his famous Roman tone-poems strikes the ears of puritanical persons as altogether too much of a dangerously good thing. These more modestly scored arrangements, which still have ample color and an admirable textural clarity, seem to me to provide a legitimate way of enjoying some charming tunes we should otherwise never have a chance to hear, rather as Liszt’s operatic piano fantasies did for 19th-century audiences.

Schwarz ended the evening with his own orchestrations of four Contrapuncti from The Art of Fugue. They were eloquently played, and effectively blended restrained instrumental colorings with fidelity to the spirit of Bach’s text. To tell the truth, I find the tonal uniformity and rhythmic squareness of these assuredly masterly fugal essays a shade tedious in such a grouping; in particular, I find it curious that the composer should have chosen for extended treatment a fugal subject that, unlike those of most of his greatest fugues, begins so firmly on the main beat of the measure. But I know I am in a minority in my somewhat qualified enthusiasm for Bach, so let it pass, let it pass.

Bernard Jacobson


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