SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Jolivet, Debussy, and Stravinsky: Seattle Symphony musicians and guests, Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 8.10.2010 (BJ)

 

Music by Jolivet and Debussy made apt first-half companion pieces for Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat on this neatly designed chamber-concert program.


An ensemble led by Seattle Symphony associate concertmaster Emma McGrath played Jolivet’s Rhapsodie à sept with impressive conviction and accuracy. Effectively combining spasmodic gesture with insistent pulse, the Rhapsodie, composed in 1957, is scored for the same combination of instruments as Stravinsky had used four decades and a half earlier in L’Histoire: in this performance, Jordan Anderson played the contrabass, Laura DeLuca and Seth Krimsky the clarinet and bassoon, David Gordon and Ko-ichiro the trumpet and trombone, and Michael A. Werner the percussion. Their colleagues Zartouhi Dombourian-Eby, Susan Gulkis Assadi, and Valerie Muzzolini Gordon followed with a suitably luscious performance of Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp.

After intermission, the former group was joined for the Stravinsky by narrator Jean Sherrard. The Seattle-based actor, writer, photographer, and teacher is a fine figure of a man, with a resonant voice and a good feeling for words. He offered a one-person version of the text originally intended “to be read, played, and danced” by three actors and a dancer in addition to the instrumental septet.

Stravinsky stressed that the local references in C.F. Ramuz’s original French text should always be changed to others appropriate to wherever the work is performed. This English-language version (whose authorship was not divulged in the program book) didn’t do that: the violin in the story “cost 10 francs,” and the names invented for the ladies in the case—Gwendolyne and Véronique—hardly sounded distinctively American. Moreover, when you’re doing L’Histoire without the stage action, it would help if the speaker included such stage directions as “Enter the Devil”—that personage’s first words in this performance must have been puzzling to anyone unacquainted with the work.

Still, it was a mostly enjoyable narration, with some entertaining rhymes, which Sherrard delivered with aplomb and humor, if also perhaps with some inappropriately demonstrative drama. The style of the piece is deliberately cool, and there was altogether too much throaty roaring for the Devil’s lines. Another name for Satan, after all, is “The Great Deceiver,” but this uncompromisingly aggressive Devil wouldn’t have deceived even the naïvest of Soldiers.

Sherrard was much more effective when he, as it were, stepped back into a more restrained delivery. Near the end of this riveting story, the Narrator declares that you can’t combine a new happiness with an old one—what you have with what you once had. His simple and sad “That’s not allowed” was truly touching. And with the instrumental backing he received on this occasion—succulent violin playing from McGrath and virtuoso contributions from all concerned—this was a most welcome opportunity to experience not just the popular suite but the whole work in something like its full richness.

Bernard Jacobson