A couple of weeks ago, Ward Stare and the Rochester
Philharmonic Orchestra made a flashy, but satisfactory, season debut. That
program showed a sure hand in staples of the repertoire; this weekend’s concert
is a bit more adventurous, but even more satisfying.
It began with “Four Scottish Dances” by Malcolm Arnold, the
prolific British composer whose many film scores have the solidity of symphonic
music and whose many symphonic works (including nine symphonies and many
concertos) have the vivid appeal of film scores. The “Scottish Dances” fall
somewhere in the middle: their tunefulness and colorful orchestration make them
kind of a Hibernian counterpart to Copland’s “Rodeo.”Stare danced his way through them on the
podium, and the orchestra delivered, from the memorable whooping horn that opens
the piece to the third dance’s delicate flute solo.
Benjamin Britten’s “Serenade,” a modern masterpiece from 1943
which received its first RPO performance on Thursday night, couldn’t have been
a greater contrast to Arnold’s colorful, extroverted dance suite. In a way, its
shadowy intimacy — it is scored for a tenor soloist, accompanied by solo French
horn and a smallish string orchestra — makes it an odd choice for a symphony
concert, and for Kodak Hall, but I was delighted to hear it.
This is an early example of a Britten “anthology” song cycle,
a time-traveling collection of poems by Ben Jonson, John Keats, Lord Tennyson,
and others on the composer’s obsessions of night, sleep, and dreams. Britten’s
musical response is, as always, perfectly tailored to the words and the mood of
the poetry, and the instrumental writing is exquisitely detailed.
Tenor Andrew Stenson, who was recently featured as a “singer
to watch” in Opera News, proved he is an engaging singer. He’s not as weighty
in tone as some past interpreters of this piece, but he had a lively, dramatic
response to the words. Hornist Peter Kurau, an RPO
stalwart, gave an authoritative reading of Britten’s fiendishly virtuosic horn
part, which covers the entire range of the instrument. It was good to see Kurau center stage as a soloist. (By the way, if he sounded
“wrong” in places, he was right; Britten deliberately has the modern horn
imitate an old hunting horn. It sounds out-of-tune, but in reality is an
extremely poetic effect.)
Stenson, Kurau, and Stare treated
the “Serenade” as vocal chamber music, rarified but rewarding. The music’s
myriad details (for example, the sinister fugue for strings and horn in “This
Aye Night”, which battles the tenor’s repetitive vocal line by evoking the terrors of darkness) were
individually vivid but perfectly placed, never obscuring the singer.
Much the same might be said of the reading of
Sibelius’s Second Symphony which followed the Britten. This is a popular
symphony, with plenty of surging passion and good tunes, but in many ways it’s
an odd one. Sibelius’s episodic construction and sudden flarings
of emotion sometimes sound like he ripped up a Tchaikovsky symphony score and
tried to put the pieces back together. And many of the orchestral sounds in
this relatively early work — buzzing string ostinatos, crescendos in the brass
that build hugely and just stop — later became staples of Sibelius’s own sound world.
The RPO ranged from luscious to just this side of too loud,
but the playing was always full of life and color, with some beautiful, divided
string sound, commanding brass, and delicious wind solos (for example, the
bassoons who begin the slow movement and the famous oboe tune in the
third-movement scherzo). There’s a lot in this piece, and Stare held it all
together extremely well. He seems to respond to Sibelius’s interesting oddities
of orchestration and form — a flash of light here and a curious patch of
darkness there — while setting them into a convincing large canvas. The big
finale in the Second is a little too “big finale” here for me, but conductor
and orchestra certainly gave it all they had.
Is it fair to assess Stare’s work as a conductor and music
director two concerts into this season? Probably not, but I can say that I like
what I have heard so far. Based on Stare’s past and future programming, he
seems to most enjoy creating a big, solid, energetic orchestral sound with big,
solid, energetic orchestral works. It will be interesting to hear him in Mozart
and Beethoven, but he’s winning on Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, and other late
Romantics, and he seems to be interested in all kinds of repertoire the
orchestra hasn’t done much of lately (programming Britten’s “Serenade,” not to
mention a Sibelius symphony, is a nice sign).
In other RPO news: Principal Pops Conductor Jeff Tyzik’s contract has been renewed for another three seasons
(2016-17; 2017-18; and 2018-19). This will take him through his 25th season
with the orchestra. Tyzik can next been seen
conducting the orchestra in “Disney in Concert: Tale as Old as Time,” on Friday,
October 23, and Saturday, October 24, 8 p.m. in Kodak Hall.
This article appears in Sep 30 – Oct 6, 2015.
