concert review: New Century Chamber Orchestra

[calimac]

It is probably unseemly to have fun on the anniversary of 9/11. Pandora didn't - she paid a visit to the vet, meowing piteously in several octaves all the way there - but later on I did, by attending this concert at the Concrete Tent in Palo Alto.

The NCCO is a string orchestra, so even with piano and percussion added (the latter played by the go-to man for all things percussion in the South Bay, Galen Lemmon), they couldn't play Maurice Ravel's full-bodied orchestration of Mussorgsky's piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition. What they could do is commission a new orchestration of it by Clarice Assad. This was the fun part. All kinds of imaginative effects - solo harmonics, weird glissandi - added very much in keeping with Mussorgsky's spirit. Tubular bells clanging away at opportune moments gave a strange Christmasy feeling to the work, which at other times - solo cello with piano, or a passage for string quartet - sounded like chamber music. Assad made no better decision than to give the main theme in "The Old Castle" - in Ravel it's an alto saxophone - to a solo viola. It seems simple, but the effect is astonishing, and convinced me that a viola can sound more like a sax than a sax does.

Also on the program, two tinkerings with Bach: a keyboard concerto arranged as a violin concerto, which worked, oddly enough, and the infamous Chaconne in D Minor for solo violin (the work that Joshua Bell played in the Washington Metro) in a lush arrangement for string orchestra, which was enjoyable, but not Bach. The arranger erased all the Bachian querulousness from the work, turning it into a tamed pastiche of Baroque style from a later viewpoint. Consequently it sounded exactly like an out-take from a well-known work for string orchestra that seriously and by intent fits that description, and I'll let you guess what that work is. (Clue: it's the piece that Giles is trying to listen to when Dawn keeps changing the station on his car radio.)

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

A viola sounding like an alto sax. Woah.

You make me think of my recent near-future science-fiction campaign, where I had one of the player characters, a jazz musician, invited to join an ensemble being put together by a young woman who was a jazz violist. I was aiming for eccentric and experimental instrumentation, but if a viola can sound like a saxophone it might have worked surprisingly well. . . .

[(Anonymous)]

! A =Buffy= reference I don't remember! And if the piece you're referring to isn't Barber, or Part, or Vaughan Williams, I give up. Do tell (and remind me which =Buffy= episode, too!)

Don Keller