• Daniel Barenboim conducts Staatskapelle Berlin, 1-9
• John Eliot Gardiner conducts Monteverdi Choir and
  Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique, 1-10
• Itzhak Perlman recital, UCLA Royce Hall, 1-15
• Los Angeles Master Chorale, Disney Hall, 1-25

Fri, January 9
WHAT a way to jumpstart a new year -- with two world-famous conductors bringing their well-drilled ensembles to the South Land.  The first, Staatskapelle Berlin, is the less travelled, but no less formidable, group steep in the German Romantic tradition.  The all-German program showcased the former GDR orchestra for the sweeping grandeur and infectious enthusiasm of its playing.  The purist may frown at the occasional lack of precision and polish in the heat of high drama, but the palpable, visceral excitement that this orchestra creates was undeniable. 

Conductor Daniel Barenboim, returning to Orange County after his 1997 concert with the Vienna Philharmonic, is one of today's finest interpreters of the central German Romantic repertoire.  To him, the music's architectural clarity is as important as the note values themselves.  At one heated passage during Schumann's Symphony No. 4, the ensemble nearly was thrown off the track by the sheer animalistic abandon of the playing, but it soon regained composure and softened into a molasses of honeyed sounds.  In my view, it is this extreme contrast of brutality and spirituality that made the Staatskapelle's playing, and Barenboim's conducting, so uniquely memorable.  The Manfred Overture, full of longings and romantic angst, suited the orchestra's temperaments perfectly.  In Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, the fate-motif went on overdrive, knocking and twitching like a half-crazed creature through the symphony's four movements.  In contrast, the gentle encore of the slow movement from Brahms' Third Symphony provided a soothing antidote to the steroids-filled main program.

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Sat, January 10
The second major ensemble to visit So Cal was the redoubtable Monteverdi Choir and the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique -- an altogether more refined, though no less exciting, experience than the Germans.  The urbane British group, led by conductor John Eliot Gardiner, performed a splendid program of ceremonial and religious works at UCLA's Royce Hall (a UCLAlive presentation). 

Playing on period instruments, including 1 recorder and 3 valveless horns, the ORR tripped through the music with brisk tempi and light bows. Similarly, the Monteverdi Choir sang with a bright timbre and minimal vibrato.  Some may prefer a heavier, more operatic style of singing, but that would have been out of place in the 18th-Century religious music offered here -- Handel's Coronation Anthem No. 1 "Zadok the Priest", Mozart's Vesperae Solennes de Confessore, K. 339 and Haydn's Mass in D minor "Lord Nelson Mass".  The brilliant sound of the Monteverdi Choir was heard to great effect in the Coronation Anthem, and the Mozart Vespers (with tempestuous passages reminiscent of "Idomeneo") offered a memorable solo turn for Choir soprano Angharad Gruffydd Jones, who sang Laudate Dominum with unforced purity and grace.  Ms. Jones also shone in the "Nelson" mass, delivering heavenly runs of Et resurrexit with joyous abandon.  Conductor John Eliot Gardiner kept a tight rein on the pulse of the music, maintaining rhythmic vigor and weaving together a majestic tapestry of sounds from the choir and the orchestra.  It was a magnificent achievement.

The following Sunday afternoon, January 11, the same group performed at Costa Mesa's Segerstrom Hall in a concert presented by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County.  It was even more electrifying than at the acoustically staid Royce Hall.  The horns shot forth more brilliantly, and the soloists had no problem being heard at all.  The performance as a whole felt more exuberant and rapturously uplifting.  What a difference a hall makes!

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Thu, January 15
Itzhak Perlman's rare appearance at UCLA's Royce Hall was an exciting affair.  If the program seemed disappointingly conventional, it was carried out with such extraordinary skills and charisma that made the Poulenc violin sonata, for example, seem more substantial than it is.  Mr. Perlman's musicianship is unimpeachable; his style is unmistakably masculine -- bold and passionate, with a pleasingly silky, cantabile tone from the 1714 "Soil" Stradivarius.  Beethoven's popular "Spring" sonata heard some finely chiseled playing in the long arcs of the adagio, and the immaculate collaborative work with pianist Janet Goodman Guggenheim was a joy to behold.  Mozart's B-flat major sonata, the only work on the program worthy of Mr. Perlman's artistry, received a glowing, enchanting account with an easy flow that managed to convey much of this late work's poignant undertones. A total of five encores were offered, conveying not only different facets of Mr. Perlman's art (dreamily poetic in Faure's "Berceuse", daredevilish in Fiocco's "Allegro"), but also his inimitable sense of humor ("an old piece by Zarzycki, so old, in fact, that it cost $0.64")

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Sun, January 25
Three months after its opening, the Walt Disney Hall's wondrous acoustics continues to impress musicians and audiences alike.  So perfect is the acoustics, in fact, that you can hear a pin drop on stage as clearly as a tiny cough or whisper in the audience.  And when you have a small a cappella group on stage singing to a packed house of tourists unfamiliar with concert etiquettes, the problem can be downright annoying.

The program was sacred music of the Elizabethan England, with lofty aims of transporting the listener to spiritual ecstasies.  Music director Grant Gershon asked the audience to hold their applause until the end of each half, but obviously did not anticipate the wave of bronchial afflictions that threatened to derail the calm and spirituality of the sacred pieces.

Under the circumstances, the Los Angeles Master Chorale made a valiant effort to impart a sense of wonder and profundity to the proceedings.  The main work on the program -- William Byrd's Mass for five voices -- was inserted between its sections short choral works by John Tavener (b. 1944), and English Renaissance composers Thomas Tallis and Peter Philips.  It's a daring experiment that worked surprisingly well, blending and bridging five centuries of English sacred music in one seamless, stylistic continuum.

Maestro Gershon directed a glowing performance of the Byrd mass that was full of beauty and emotion (although it does not match the profound spirituality of Byrd’s Mass for three voices, a better work in my opinion).  In Tavener’s Annunciation, the Master Chorale recreated the Chapel setting with a solo quartet positioned inside the auditorium, creating otherworldly stereophonic effects.  Their powerful sound came from only 48 singers.

My other reservation about the concert, apart from the ‘lively’ acoustics, concerns the choral singing technique that emphasized a big, bold sound rather than a simple, straight tone characteristic of the finest British choirs.  (I am reminded of the visiting Monteverdi Choir from England last week in Orange County.) 

All told, if the sacred concert was not quite the sublime spiritual experience that it would have been in the ecclesiastical setting of, say, the nearby Cathedral of the Lady of Angels, it nonetheless succeeded in inspiring the listener to explore further an era of such tremendous fecundity and vitality that was the English Renaissance.  I plan to spend the next two weeks revisiting madrigals of John Dowland on CD – without the annoying coughs and other acoustical anomalies.
 

Truman C. Wang is editor of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, the Pasadena Star-News and other Southern California publications. 

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