Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
Yuri Temirkanov (conductor)
Yo-Yo
Ma (cello)
Harolyn Blackwell and Janice Chandler-Eteme
(sopranos)
Saturday 5 February 2005
Music Center at Strathmore,
North Bethesda, Maryland, USA
Tchaikovsky: Polonaise from Eugene
Onegin
Hersch: Arraché (world
premiere)
Bernstein: "Glitter and Be Gay" from
Candide
Tchaikovsky: Pas de Deux and "Waltz of the Flowers" from
The Nutcracker
Bruch: Kol Nidrei and Ave Maria for
cello and orchestra
Villa-Lobos: Bachianas Brasileiras No.
5
Shostakovich: Festive Overture
The new Music Center at Strathmore was built primarily to be a second
home for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which will perform 25 concerts there
each season. When, about seven years ago, plans were announced for its
construction on a site about 10 miles from the Kennedy Center, the home of
Washington's National Symphony Orchestra, local music critics noted that the
hall's opening would mark the first time in American history that two major
ensembles of similar quality would regularly perform in such close
proximity.
But the inaugural concert demonstrated something even rarer than two top-flight orchestras with residences half an hour or so apart: A concert hall that ranks with the finest anywhere.
The feeling of space inside Strathmore's concert hall is critical to
the pleasure of hearing music there. Working closely with acoustician
Lawrence Kirkegaard, architect William Rawn has designed the auditorium to be
agreeably intimate. Strathmore has an ambience like that of 19th-century halls. It
is small, seating fewer than 2,000. Its three balconies do not stare down on
the stage from afar; they seem close enough to embrace it. There is wood —
warm-hued red birch — everywhere; there are neither the unnecessary
comforts of sound-absorbing carpets nor the visual distractions of chandeliers.
One learns with surprise that what appear to be wood panels that glow with
unusual ardor are, in fact, lighting fixtures. The orchestra plays from a
slightly raised, proscenium-free stage surrounded on all sides by the audience.
If concert halls may be compared to places or worship, Strathmore approaches
more closely the eloquent simplicity of the Quaker meeting house than the
rhetorical magnificence of the cathedral.
To show off the hall's acoustics, Baltimore Symphony music director Yuri Temirkanov selected a smorgasbord of short favorites. Every piece on the program — with the exception of Arraché, a new work commissioned for the occasion from Michael Hersch, and Max Bruch's rarely performed Ave Maria for cello and orchestra — were chestnuts. It was if Temirkanov were challenging the audience to recall a time and place when and where they had ever heard these thrice-familiar pieces sound more beautiful than they would sound at Strathmore.
The opening work, the Polonaise from Eugene Onegin, left no doubt about the hall's ability to transmit the score's rushing strings and triumphant brass and timpani. Twenty-four hours earlier in Meyerhoff Hall (the orchestra's venue in downtown Baltimore), the same piece had turned occasionally harsh and strident. But at Strathmore, after a moment or two of Tchaikovsky's exultant affirmations, one began to feel enveloped, from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling, in full, warm sound.
The program had been supposed to begin with Arraché. That Temirkanov decided to play it after the festive Polonaise was understandable: Hersch's intense, anxious music is not ideal for celebratory occasions. The title, as the composer explained in a program note, means "torn or ripped from, torn away"; the piece was written in reaction to the "unspeakable terror" of the news coming from Iraq. Hersch certainly knows how to write and organize a piece. But on this occasion, the music, with its neo-Shostakovichian shrieks, sounded less authentic in its anger and less memorably ferocious than (for instance) Shostakovich's own.
Reverberant spaces are usually deadly for operatic music, and certainly for coloratura arias such as Bernstein's "Glitter and Be Gay." In Meyerhoff on the previous evening, for example, Harolyn Blackwell's words were barely audible. But while Strathmore has plenty of resonance, Blackwell's singing, while not sounding as brilliant as it would have in the dryer acoustic of an opera house, had far more clarity and bite than in Baltimore.
In two excerpts from The Nutcracker, Strathmore's acoustics were kind to Tchaikovsky's breadth, intensity and passion (in the Pas de Deux) and to his rich string texture and lilting rhythms (in the "Waltz of the Flowers").
A pair of short pieces by Max Bruch, featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma, suggested
that the hall will be kind to soloists. In his performance of Kol Nidrei,
Ma may have lacked the full measure of Bruch's somber, Hebraic lyricism. But
both there and in the-less familiar Ave Maria, one could hear every hair
of his bow.
Just as beautifully executed, but more moving emotionally, was the surging intensity of Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 for soprano and eight cellos. Janice Chandler-Eteme was the radiant soloist, supported by Temirkanov leading an ensemble of splendid cellists that included Ma, several members of the orchestra and four terrific teenagers: Jeffrey Chu, Rachel Gawell, Colin Stokes and Tianheng Wang.
The evening ended appropriately with Shostakovich's Festive Overture.
This piece, one of the incomparable jeux d'esprit in the symphonic
repertory, can sound like a potboiler in the wrong hands. But nobody conducts
Shostakovich better than Temirkanov. He knows where the jibes and jokes are
— as well as how to underline them, whether with jeering brass or
frivolous, impudent accelerandos. He raced through this rambunctious,
jubilant music with a twinkle in his eye. His manner exuded confidence in his
players to capture the music's dangerously cheeky details — as well as
in the acoustical capacity of this marvelous new hall to convey those details to
the audience seated in it.
