Mozart and Tchaikovsky:  Elizabeth Stoyanovich, cond., Tatyana Siomina and Earl Rice, actors, Bremerton Symphony Orchestra, Bremerton Performing Arts Center, Bremerton, WA, 21. 4. 2007 (BJ)

 

Someone once remarked that the notes in Mozart’s music love one another. (Citing that observation, the Polish-born composer Andrzej Panufnik confessed in his autobiography to having “the impression that Schoenberg’s notes hated each other.”) For at least the first two movements of Mozart’s 29th Symphony, I am happy to report, the notes in this performance lived up to expectations: the orchestra gave its talented music director, Elizabeth Stoyanovich, some really beautiful playing. Textures were clean, with lines often nudging each other along to lively effect, tone was smoothly burnished, and accents, heightened sometimes by subtle agogic anticipation, were at once forceful and nicely in scale with 18th-century style.

The minuet was, like the preceding movements, judiciously paced, but here it was as if the lovers were having a tiff or two. Despite the swift tempo called for by the finale, which indeed went splendidly at an appropriately dashing clip, it is the minuet that seems to be the hardest movement of the four to play, and the strings’ intonation lost its unanimity for a while, though there was still much to enjoy in the zest of the performance. Ms. Stoyanovich set a markedly slower tempo for the central trio, a decision justified by the strong contrast between the dancing rhythms of the main minuet and the song-like legato of this section, and it had the result of making the return of the minuet especially invigorating.

After intermission, we were treated to a kind of dramatized presentation of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, with complete performances of the four movements preceded and interspersed with commentary from the conductor, short excerpts played by the orchestra to illustrate her points, and letters exchanged by the composer and his patroness, Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck, read by actors impersonating the letter-writers. I am generally suspicious of attempts to elucidate music through extra-musical and biographical means, but the very specific nature of Tchaikovsky’s own elucidation of his expressive intentions in what he called “our symphony” made this particular project distinctly illuminating. Tatyana Siomina, a native of Odessa who now lives in the Bremerton area, and Earl Rice, usually seen on this stage as a member of the orchestra’s first-violin section, were attired in period costume and delivered their lines elegantly. The only thing that seemed to me a little odd was the casting. Madame von Meck was nine years older than her protégé, but the pair we saw on this occasion more than reversed the age differential. Ms. Siomina is a quite beautiful young woman, while Mr. Rice, though he looked strikingly like Tchaikovsky, was clearly not the 30-something composer who wrote these letters; the result was to alter the sense in which we perceived their deeply affectionate yet unfailingly courteous, indeed courtly, correspondence.

Never mind: the idea was well worth trying, and it surely threw an arresting new light on the music for most of the audience. As for that music, it was rousingly, even thrillingly, and at times very delicately played. The strings tackled their taxing parts with aplomb, the woodwinds contributed a wealth of finely shaped solos, and the brasses, appropriately in a work dominated by so many stentorian fanfares, covered themselves with glory, the horn section in particular–committing remarkably few flubs for that notoriously treacherous instrument–achieving an accuracy of intonation that made its chords sound refreshingly pure. Tchaikovsky being an out-and-out romantic, you might expect his orchestral writing to offer more refuge for weaker brethren than Mozart’s naked textures, in which there is no place to conceal mistakes. But Tchaikovsky too wrote music of considerable textural lucidity, and this performance of what is surely his greatest work negotiated its pitfalls skillfully and made the most of its often intricately offset rhythms and unpredictable yet purposeful and propulsive bass-lines. As on previous occasions, the performance Elizabeth Stoyanovich drew from her players achieved a standard well beyond what we tend to expect from an essentially amateur orchestra.

 

Bernard Jacobson