SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Wright, Wilson, Dohnányi, Leonard, and Brahms:  Members of the Philadelphia Orchestra; Natalie Zhu, piano, Whidbey Island Center for the Arts, 3.11.2007 (BJ)

To judge from its enticingly named web site–www.donothinghere.com–you might think take Whidbey Island, a 24-mile drive plus a 20-minute ferry ride northwest of Seattle, to be a boringly somnolent community. That impression is emphatically belied by the extraordinarily rich artistic life presented at the island’s arts center in the town of Langley, where all manner of musical, dramatic, cinematographic, and visual activities go on all year round under the administration of executive director Stacie Burgua. (If you plan to visit the island, by the way, I can warmly recommend Country Cottage of Langley as a charmingly relaxed bed-and-breakfast establishment, and the Fish Bowl as the place for a delicious and sophisticated dinner.)

In the center’s handsome and acoustically excellent performance space, a recent program brought five members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, with guest pianist Natalie Zhu, to play a varied program of chamber music featuring horn, percussion, strings, and piano. You may wonder what the orchestra players were doing performing 3,000 miles from their regular sphere of operation. Well, it happens that, two years ago, Philadelphia Orchestra violist Judy Geist, who is also a talented painter, built herself a house and studio on the island, and it was presumably through her inspiration that this concert took shape.

I should at this point declare an interest. 23 years ago, I was working for the Philadelphia Orchestra, having been hired by Riccardo Muti to write the program notes and, among other things, to set up a chamber-music series for the orchestra members. (Interesting contrast of attitudes: Muti’s predecessor, Eugene Ormandy, had vigorously discouraged any sign of chamber-musical activity on the part of his players–he seems to have felt that such shenanigans would lead them to get above themselves–whereas Muti regarded such a series as vital to the orchestra’s musical culture.) Not only was this Whidbey Island evening very much like the programs I helped to put together in Philadelphia back in those days, but Judy Geist and three of the four colleagues who joined her on this trip were among the regular participants in the Philadelphia series–the horn-player, Adam Unsworth, joined the orchestra later, and furthermore my wife and I are great fans of Judy’s paintings, three of which (all depicting cats) hang in our living room.

As it happens, there were two works on this program that I might not myself have been all that keen to include. Dana Wilson’s Graham’s Crackers, written for Unsworth at the time of the birth of the latter’s son Graham, enabled the player to demonstrate an impressive range of tone-color and, at the end of the slow first movement, a superbly controlled pianissimo diminuendo, but the other two movements, both fast, sounded to me too much like each other for a really good overall effect. Stanley Leonard’s Canto 2, for horn and timpani, offered a splendidly propulsive central section in which Unsworth and timpanist Don Liuzzi urged one another forward splendidly; here, it was in the slower outer sections that the relation between the instruments seemed arbitrary and unconvincing.

Liuzzi had begun the evening with a highly entertaining piece by Philadelphia composer Maurice Wright. Titled simply Marimba Music, it sets the live instrument in quirky dialogue with a recording of related sounds, and some of the rhythmic interplay was delightfully effective.

Violist Geist was joined in Dohnányi’s Serenade for String Trio by violinist Paul Arnold and cellist Kathy Picht Read, and in Brahms’s Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 25, also by pianist Natalie Zhu. The Dohnányi is an agreeable enough work, though its finale might be called a bit silly. It certainly drew a fine performance from the trio. But it was the Brahms at the end of the evening, expertly phrased and richly intoned by all four players, and culminating in a gypsy finale of positively vertiginous athleticism and devil-may-care zest, that had the audience on its feet cheering. What with the display of Judy Geist’s daringly colorful and imaginative paintings that adorned the lobby, the evening was a triumph for her, and one in which her colleagues happily shared.

Bernard Jacobson

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