Four Mother's Weekend concerts (1st review)

At least once every year, all the music organizations in Philadelphia schedule concerts for the same weekend. This year the Days of Impossible Choices fell on Mother's Day weekend. Philadelphia mothers could have received huge helpings of musical culture with their traditional Chinese dinner.

Friday night I had to choose between three of my favorite organizations: Dolce Suono, Piffaro and Karl Middleman's Classical Symphony. I could reduce the strain by attending Piffaro's repeat in Chestnut Hill on Saturday, but that still left me with two equally attractive events.

Dolce Suono won the mental coin toss. Mimi Stillman had scheduled one acknowledged masterpiece— Debussy's sonata for flute, viola, and harp— and a premiere by a dependable local composer, Andrea Clearfield. In addition, the Clearfield and the program's other two items were both composed for one of the best combinations the French invented: flute, harp and string trio.

I started listening to the Debussy many years ago because it plays with the colors of three of my favorite instruments. There's more to it than that, however. Every performance highlights something different. This one focused on the conversational aspect of chamber music, with an emphasis on the interactions between three distinctive voices.

A workout for a flutist

Clearfield called her new work a "Rhapsody," a term that can lead composers into a number of follies, since it lets them tootle on any way they please, without the discipline of a standard form. Clearfield imposed an overall order by building her piece around the "unveiling" (her term) of a unifying motif. She and Mimi Stillman have worked together since Stillman (as a 12-year-old flutist) entered Curtis and Clearfield created a real flute workout for her. For most of this work, the flute takes the lead and plays over a complex, varied background.

Overall, Clearfield's rhapsody is an intense, riveting piece. The other musicians may spend most of their time creating a background, but they have to be damn good. The selection that followed the Clearfield, the Chant de Linos by Andre Jolivet, is one of the masterworks for this combination, but in this case it seemed anti-climactic.

Saturday I resolved my scheduling conflicts with a double header: Piffaro in the evening and the Choral Arts Society's Mass in B Minor in the afternoon.

A humidity problem

Bach's Mass is another undisputable masterpiece. It's so good, in fact, that an adequate performance would transform most weekends into a major occasion. Matthew Glandorf conducted a performance that rated well above the adequate level. I was particularly impressed with the way the voices of the vocal quintet complemented each other in the duets and quartets. The all-important instrumental obbligatos that accompany the solos included exceptional work on the Baroque flute and the Baroque oboe.

Glandorf had to pause now and then to tune— an unavoidable problem when you combine period strings with Philadelphia humidity— but he produced sharp jumps from soloists to chorus when it counted, and the choruses included a notably reverent opening and a moving final prayer for peace.

The quintet featured two star sopranos, Julianne Baird and Laura Heimes, but the most striking voice belonged to countertenor Ian Howell. Howell is a true male alto, with the range and color of a female alto and the extra fullness produced by the male chest cavity— a combination that entranced Baroque aficionados.

Praise for Apollo and Jove, from 1496

The Piffaro concert made an interesting pairing with the Bach, since both featured Latin texts with religious subjects. In the afternoon, Bach glorified the Patria and the Holy Trinity. In the evening, I listened to Renaissance hymns to Jove and Apollo, along with lesser deities such as Grammar and Logic.

The skeleton of the Piffaro concert was a 1496 treatise that discussed the modes used in early musical theory and related them to the passions associated with the gods and their planets. This might sound like a dry subject, but the program's creator, Piffaro musician Grant Herreid, decorated the academic skeleton with music that paraded the whole range of human feelings. Woodcuts from the Renaissance publication were projected on a screen, along with tastefully laid out translations, and Piffaro chose the instrumental combinations for the dances and vocal numbers with the band's customary ability to draw the maximum amount of variety from its menagerie of krumhorns, bagpipes, harps, cornettos and other Renaissance exotics.

The Piffaro concert included another notable new voice. Piffaro's guest vocalist, Ellen Hargis, is a nationally renowned early music specialist with a flawless soprano that cuts through the noisiest instrumental accompaniments.

Solzhenitsyn's latest challenge

On Sunday, Center City was packed with participants in the breast cancer Race for the Cure. Ignat Solzhenitsyn contributed a musical marathon by conducting Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto from the keyboard. This was a standard practice from the Baroque period though the Mozart-Haydn era. With Beethoven, Solzhenitsyn took on a more formidable challenge.

Solzhenitsyn has extended the range of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia by scheduling classic and romantic works that are normally played with 60-piece orchestras, rather than the 35 fielded by his orchestra. When the experiment works— as it did this time— the result is an unusually light and lucid reading, marked by touches such as the gracefulness of the big marching passages in the first movement of the concerto.

The concerto also received the benefit of a totally unified vision. Maestro Solzhenitsyn could give soloist Solzhenitsyn the exact accompaniment he wanted.

Solzhenitsyn followed the excitements of the concerto with an Eighth Symphony that emphasized Beethoven's skills as a charmer and should have added a perfect coda to any mother's holiday— unless, of course, mom's womanly yearnings lean toward more Byronic expressions of masculinity.

With masterpieces by Bach, Beethoven and Debussy, and a historical range that covered 1496 to 2009, these four concerts should have satisfied any reasonably cultured mother's tastes. And let's not forget that we got to enjoy all these wonders because the musicians who made them happen all had moms (and dads) who paid for their music lessons. And made them practice. â—†





To read another review of the Dolce Suono concert by Victor Schermer, click here.
To red another review of the Bach B-minor Mass by Dan Coren, click here.