Opening its 2015-16 Masterworks season on Friday, Oct. 2, at the Overture Center, the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra produced a very mixed-bag program.
The first half brought us two novelties. Beyond loyalty to his native New Zealand, conductor Andrew Sewell has rightly been bringing us music of his compatriots. None is more deserving of this than Douglas Lilburn (1915-2001), whose music is too little known in the U.S. His contribution was a score for strings, as paired with a poem, Landfall in Unknown Seas, by Allen Curnow. The two were commissioned to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Abel Tasman’s discovery in 1642 of what became New Zealand and Tasmania.
The poem’s three stanzas were alternated with the four movements of the music. American Players Theatre core company member James Ridge read the stanzas with crystal-clear diction, while the WCO’s strings delivered the music with ravishing suavity. Lilburn’s writing for strings is idiomatic, interesting, and melodiously beautiful. Quite frankly, I would have been happy just to hear the music, as a four-movement suite, without the pretentious verses.
For decades I have loved the Second of the published symphonies of Camille Saint-Saëns. It was written in 1859, when the composer was only 25, and at a time when French musicians were trying rather half-heartedly to create a post-Beethoven symphonic literature of Gallic character. This score, with tasty suggestions of Mendelssohn and Schumann, has been totally overshadowed by Saint-Saëns’ gigantic Third Symphony, composed over a quarter-century later. But I am personally delighted that Maestro Sewell has given us a chance to hear the Second Symphony’s charming and witty music, so sadly neglected.
After the intermission came the heavy stuff: No less than Beethoven’s great Violin Concerto in D major. As Beethoven’s Third Symphony revolutionized the symphonic form, defining it for the rest of the nineteenth century, he did the same with this huge rethinking of what a violin concerto could be. Addressing it as guest soloist was Ben Beilman, a new American wunderkind. Looking even younger than his 25 years, he is already a fabulous technician, and should grow into a very important musician.
But “grow” is the key word. Beilman approached this towering work as if intending to miniaturize it. His tone is sweet, but he seems to revel in understatement, employing a dynamic range that, at low volumes, almost made the solo line disappear for moments. The cadenzas he used were unspecified. (Soloists should be required to identify the ones they choose, where there are existing alternatives.) They struck me as muddled collages, the choice for the first movement even ringing in the timpani parts Beethoven designed for the piano adaptation of this concerto.
The orchestra itself, and Sewell, were in their natural terrain, and sounded splendid—indeed, when they cut loose in their regular tutti passages, it seemed as if they were so glad to make some heroic sound after the Beilman’s soft-pedaling.
The soloist also played two unidentified unaccompanied movements by Bach as encores.
If Beilman is brought back again it will be interesting to hear how his talent grows in interpretative wisdom.
