Arts & Events

In a season-ending series of concerts honoring the 30^th anniversary of Nicholas McGegan’s tenure as Music Director, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra performed works of Beethoven and Mendelssohn. I attended the Saturday evening concert, April 30, at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church. While I don’t like to make a point of disagreeing with San Francisco Chronicle’s music critic, Joshua Kosman, I must say that I found an extreme lack of balance in Kosman’s review of this program, for he so over-weighted his praise for the Mendelssohn 2^nd Symphony, or Hymn of Praise, Op. 52, that he relegated the Beethoven works performed on this program to a mere afterthought at the end of his review. To my mind, Mendelssohn doesn’t deserve all that much praise for this uneven though impressive work, nor, to put it mildly, does Beethoven deserve to be so cavalierly treated, even for works that are relatively unfamiliar to us. 

Let’s start with Beethoven, for that’s where the program began. First we heard Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3, Op. 72b. This, of course, is perhaps the best known of the four overtures Beethoven wrote for his only opera, Fidelio. Beethoven worked incessantly to revise this opera, and the Leonore Overture No. 3 is perhaps the best of his efforts at an overture. However, it is often played, in a tradition begun in the 19^th century and continuing today, not at the outset of the opera but, rather, between Acts II and III. Performed in this position, it offers a musical shorthand version of actions we have just seen and heard in Act II and prefigures the action we are about to see and hear in Act III. Its music begins in the deep, dark prison cell where Florestan is a political prisoner held by his bitter rival Pizarro, and it evokes the entry of Florestan’s wife, Leonore, disguised as a boy named Fidelio, to help her husband in any way she can. A trumpet call heralds a deus ex machina in the arrival of a beneficent ruler who will free Florestan, punish Pizarro, and reward Leonore for her efforts on behalf of her husband. Under the baton of Nicholas McGegan, who led his period-instrument orchestra in a rendition devoid of vibrato, this was as clean and crisp an interpretation of this fine overture as you will find anywhere. 

Next on the program was a Beethoven rarity – Elegaischer Gesang (Elegiac Song), Op. 118. Beethoven wrote this short piece in commemoration of the third anniversary of the death of the second wife of a friend, who was also Beethoven’s patron and landlord during some of the happiest years of Beethoven’s life. If the song itself is too brief and too straightforwardly serene to garner much attention, it is still noteworthy as a token of Beethoven’s tender side, especially in an age when we seem to think of Beethoven only, or at least mainly, as a composer of difficult and thundering works of strorm and stress. The third and final Beethoven work in this program was a setting of Goethe’s poem, Meersstille und glückliche Fahrt (Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage). Here Beethoven paints a splendid musical and psychological picture of what it meant for sailors at that time to be becalmed without even a breeze. There is an ominous tint to the opening verses, and this quality is only overcome when, in the second set of verses, the wind suddenly picks up and the sailors happily glimpse a port of call. Beethoven, who had been introduced to Goethe, sent him a copy of the score which he dedicated to the poet; but Goethe, who appreciated Beethoven as a composer yet found his character overly rude and brusque, declined to respond to Beethoven’s letter and dedication. Nor did Goethe respond when Beethoven inquired whether the great poet had in fact received his initial letter. In any case, this work is a fine piece of scene painting and psychological penetration, rendered in musical terms.  

Now that we have at least given Beethoven his due, we can turn to the Mendelssohn work that, after intermission, caused Joshua Kosman to wax rhap-sodic in excessive praise. This was my first live hearing of Mendelssohn’s Hymn of Praise, or 2nd Symphony; and I must say I was not impressed with the way it began. Most of the orchestral Sinfonia that opens this work was far too bombastic for my taste. There were no changes in dynamics for many long minutes, where everything was played fortissimo. When a lonely, plaintive bassoon solo occurs, we almost sigh with relief; but the orchestra immediately ramps up full blast once again. I was getting quite dismayed at this onslaught of bombast; but, suddenly, with an oboe solo, a swirling waltz rhythm began in the strings and continued for quite a few measures, sometimes with graceful horns, offering a welcome respite from the otherwise overwrought material of this Sinfonia. 

Taking his inspiration from Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in the 9^th Symphony, as well as from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Passions, Mendelssohn coined this work a Symphoniekantate (Symphony-Cantata). Indeed, with three singers as soloists and, in these performances, three joined choirs – Philharmonia Chorale, and members of Stanford Chamber Chorale and U.C. Berkeley Chamber Chorus – this Lobgesang (Hymn of Praise) approaches the form, if not the emotional intensity and musical density, of Bach’s great Passions. However, for the Saturday performance I attended, soprano Dominique Labelle was unfortunately indisposed; and young Ashley Valentine, who sang the second soprano role in the first two concerts in this series, quickly learned the first soprano part, while Tonia D’Amelio stepped in to sing the second soprano. Thomas Cooley sang the tenor part in all performances.  

I had heard Ashley Valentine earlier this spring at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s performance of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen; and I wrote very appreciatively of Ashley Valentine’s superb vocal technique in handling Purcell’s difficult coloratura passages. However, here, in Mendelssohn’s Hymn of Praise, Valentine’s voice at times failed to project against the composer’s heavy orchestration or, in a duet, against the powerful singing of tenor Thomas Cooley. Nonetheless, in her duet with second soprano Tonia D’Amelio, “I waited for the Lord,” Ashley Valentine gave a beautiful rendition of this “greatest hit” of the whole work. For her part, Tonia D’Amelio was especially effective when, in a solo with interjecting chorus, “The night is departing,” her voice was suddenly heard from the balcony, projecting out over the entire hall and adding a spatial dimension to the music. Meanwhile, tenor Thomas Cooley was superb throughout, perhaps especially in his turbulent solo aria, “The sorrows of death had closed all around me.” 

The huge chorus, led by Bruce Lamott, was especially eloquent in its a capella singing of the first stanzas of the 17^th century Lutheran hymn, “Now thank we all our God.” Likewise, the chorus sang effectively the closing biblical passage, “All that has life and breath, Sing to the Lord.” However, unfortunately, Mendelssohn’s Hymn of Praise does not quite end on this choral passage. Instead, it ramps up the orchestral forces in one long final outburst of bombast, as if to remind me, at least, and perhaps others, that in spite of Joshua Kosman’s excessive praise for it, this Hymn of Praise by Mendelssohn, for all its ambitions, has its share of flaws as well.