a tale of two pieces

This Sunday the Oregon Symphony performed a concert consisting of three pieces which it had never before in its history performed. (My apologies for that seemingly Google-translated-to-English-from-German sentence).  The Delius Irmelin Prelude was pleasant fare, and having a couple nice section viola melodic moments (and one big, exposed viola solo at the end, nicely played by Joël Belgique) made it ok for me, but overall, Delius has a long way to go to make it to my top 50 composers list.  So, the entirety of the concert was largely made up of two very different pieces, each a challenge to perform, but both quite rewarding in their own way.

The Sixth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams rounded out the first half of the concert.  It’s a beast of a piece.  Perhaps slightly less bleak than the Fourth, but not by much.  It also presents the performer with the problem of the fact that it starts you right out of the gate at 100 miles an hour.  No slow introduction to allow the sea legs to set in, the adrenalin to subside, and the wits to be gathered about one’s self.  Just right into the fire straight out of the frying pan.  Like Mahler’s symphonies, it’s written for the full capacity of a modern, virtuoso, symphony orchestra.  No matter what part you’re playing, you’re always doing something that matters, like with Mozart, for example, but unlike Mozart’s symphonies, the VW6 is usually demanding that you listen to 10 other lines at once while doing so, and either in a range or at a pace that is nearer the edge of your capabilities as a player, too.

We played the same program Saturday evening out at Bauman Auditorium at George Fox University in Newberg, which is a smaller hall with more reverberant acoustics.  The best thing about Bauman is that it’s much easier to hear across the stage, and also the collective sound of the orchestra comes back to the stage from the hall – giving a psychologically important sense of the ensemble sound – especially in very soft passages for the whole string section.  It was something of a revelation to me.  I never get to go out into the hall to hear the orchestra as an observer, so even getting to really hear the string sound and full ensemble sound in a more lively room provided a lot of good information.  Mainly, I was gratified to hear a real “big orchestra” sheen to the string section’s sound.  In the Schnitz, the highest frequencies are a bit harsh, so you lose some of the soft sheen that really makes a orchestra’s string section sound supple and effortless.  In Newberg the sheen was in full evidence right from the first entrance of the Delius, and the gorgeous Andante theme from the first movement of the VW was wonderful (at least to these ears).  Why am I going on about this? Well, it’s one thing to hear from patrons and the music director and other interested observers that the level of the orchestra’s playing has gone up, up, up, but until one has the chance to really hear that for one’s self, there is no real sense of the nature of the accomplishment.  So the Newberg performance really opened my eyes to the very real, virtuoso instrument that the Oregon Symphony has become over the last six years or so.

The sole work on the second half of the concert was Richard Strauss’ Bourgeois Gentilhomme Suite, with an added narration performed by the actor David Ogden Stiers (who is associate conductor of the Newport Symphony and has a home on the central Oregon coast).  I’ve yet to encounter a work of Richard Strauss that I have not thoroughly enjoyed playing.  His writing for strings really represents the pinnacle of the late-Romantic ethos, and is as melodically and harmonically satisfying as it is technically difficult.  Gentilhomme is a piece in a much lighter vein (both in terms of subject matter and in the purely technical area of orchestration) than this popular tone poems or operas.  There are only 16 strings on stage, many of which have independent solo lines at different points in the proceedings.  There are many more winds, brass, and percussion on stage than strings, but Strauss so cunningly orchestrates the work that ensemble balance is rarely an issue.

Playing this piece is such a delight.  Not only as a performer with one’s own part to play, but in hearing some of the amazing things that one’s colleagues get to play, too.  Jun Iwasaki, our concertmaster, playing the hugely virtuosic solo in the Dance of the Tailors movement, or the Fencing Master featuring principal trumpet Jeffrey Work and pianist Carol Rich; or Nancy Ives, our principal cellist, playing the heart-rending love song in the concluding Dinner movement.  There are too many great things going on to list them all.  And to top it all off, there was this amazing narration that was interspersed between the various movements of the suite, giving the basic elements of Molieré’s diabolically funny and witty plot, all in the guises of the main characters – each brought to life through the virtuoso acting chops by David Ogden Stiers.  It’s a shame we couldn’t get another chance to play it again at least one more time.  I was sad to see the piece go…