SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Kernis, Debussy, Bloch, and Dvořák: Gerard Schwarz (conductor), Elmar Oliveira (violin), Seattle Symphony; Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 2.10.2010 (BJ)

 

Since moving to the Seattle area with my wife five years ago, I have enjoyed any number of superb performances given by Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony. Coming, however, just a week after an account of the Brahms Third Symphony that was nothing if not cogent and polished, this performance of Dvořák’s Seventh was a salutary reminder that even the finest of conductors cannot be on song every time they raise a baton.

Beside moments to relish, such as the neatly pointed return to the main scherzo after the trio, and some eloquent solos from the woodwind and brass sections, there was too much smudged or roughly executed detail, a recurring sense of mere haste rather than true urgency, and a certain coarseness about the general orchestral sonority–all characteristics decidedly alien to Schwarz’s customarily civilized and stylish music-making.

The first half of the program was more persuasively played. With the orchestra in sympathetic support, Elmar Oliveira’s opulent violin tone did ample justice to Bloch’s Baal Shem and to a somewhat anonymous Air by Aaron Jay Kernis, whose contribution to the Gund/Simonyi Farewell Commissions series–a fully orchestrated version of his brief On Wings of Light–had begun the evening in suitably celebratory if not especially eloquent vein. Kernis is a consummate craftsman, but he has recently given us a number of works considerably more impressive than these.

Between the two Kernis pieces, Schwarz offered his four-movement suite arranged from Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. I am not convinced that Debussy’s score, deliberately restrained as it is in terms of traditional operatic rhetoric, really repays the extraction of its constituent elements into the full glare of concert performance, but the conductor and his players gave it the benefit of much delicacy in tone and phrasing.

 

Bernard Jacobson