SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Saint-Saëns, Gruber, and Berlioz: Tania Miller (conductor), Doug MacNaughton (baritone-chansonnier), Victoria Symphony, Royal Theatre, Victoria, British Columbia, 30.10.2010 (BJ)

 

The Victoria Symphony took the stage for this entertaining concert disguised as a motley crew of monsters, witches, clowns, and the like, with their music director, Tania Miller, somehow managing to wear two similarly over-the-top outfits with fetching elegance.

 

Billed as a “Halloween Fantastique,” the well-planned program was not content to offer only repertoire warhorses. The welcome rarity was Frankenstein!!, a “pan-demonium for baritone-chansonnier and orchestra after children’s rhymes by H.C. Artmann,” written in the 1970s by the Viennese composer HK Gruber (infomally known as Nali Gruber).

 

Actually, for a substantial contemporary piece playing for about 30 minutes, “rarity” is only a relatively accurate term, for in its two incarnations—there is also a version in which the orchestra is replaced by an ensemble of 12 players—Frankenstein!! has racked up a remarkable record of several hundred performances. On this occasion it was given with full orchestra in the standard (and excellent) English translation by Harriett Watts.

 

The text was delivered, and an arsenal of toy instruments played, by the Canadian baritone Doug MacNaughton. Clearly this is a performer of exceptional stylistic range: I have previously admired him in the roles of the Major Domo in Capriccio and Don Alfonso in Così fan tutte, and he was every bit as assured and convincing in Gruber’s wicked blend of humorous and satirical idioms with deeply serious undertones.

 

When Gruber performs the piece himself, which he does with equal authority in German or in a deliciously accented English, there is a wonderful disconnect between the cuddly charm of the man and the often bloodcurdling grotesquerie of the text, which covers a wide gamut of characters from Frankenstein himself to Dracula, Goldfinger, Batman and Robin, Superman, and John Wayne. MacNaughton’s way with it was lighter on the charm and heavier on the threat element: wearing a doctor’s white coat, along with thick-framed glasses, was a nice touch, accentuating the Viennese-psychoanalytic implications of the work. He sang, spoke, intoned, and played splendidly, and the occasional moments of two-character dialogue were done very effectively by way of two microphones mounted just a few inches apart.

 

Tania Miller led the orchestra in a high-octane reading of the score, and the whole thing was a big success with the evening’s festive audience, many of them accoutered in masks and similar Halloween-ish paraphernalia. The program had opened with a suitably sleazy-sounding performance of Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre, to which concertmaster Terence Tam, in devil’s garb, contributed an idiomatic solo, and it ended with that quintessential orchestral drug-trip, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique.

 

The work’s familiarity and Berlioz’s fabulous orchestration notwithstanding, this is far from being an easy score to play, and the Victoria Symphony’s crisp projection of it deserved much praise. Having previously experienced the Royal Theatre only in its operatic set-up, I found it hard to judge whether a certain thinness of sonority should be attributed to the playing or to house acoustics less well suited to orchestral playing on stage, but I suspect the latter may be the case. Perhaps this otherwise well-endowed city is in need of a real concert hall.

 

Cutting the exposition repeat has a somewhat adverse effect on the proportions of the first movement. But for the most part Miller, who prefaced the performance with informative introductory comments, paced the symphony impeccably. The grisly end of the March to the Scaffold fourth movement fell a touch short of its potential effect, but most of the work’s other pleasures were finely realized, including a gracefully phrased Ball, an atmospheric Scene in the fields (with eloquent dialogue between oboist Michael Byrne and Russell Bajer on the english horn), stirring salvos from the heavy brass in the March, and a rip-roaring rendering of the concluding Dream of a witches’ sabbath.

 

Bernard Jacobson