A natural showman, Piers Adams played the audience as much as he played his instrument.
It’s rare to hear a recorder player as an orchestra soloist. The appearance of Piers Adams with the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra on April 19 was totally unconventional, filling the first half of the concert.
Adams is a born showman. Casually dressed and ostentatiously athletic in his playing manner, he is even something of a comedian. He played the audience as much as he played his instruments.
The fact remains, though, that he is a world-class virtuoso of absolutely astonishing technical skill.
He played two distantly separated concertos. One in C major by Georg Philipp Telemann, came from the recorder’s heyday in the early 18th century. But the performance was hardly Baroque in character. Adams’ antics aside, it involved an orchestra of 20 string players, far too many and too heavy for this literature. (There was also a harpsichord, but used with limits and hardly audible.)
The other concerto was by David Bedford (1917-2011), brother of conductor Steuart Bedford. Over a blanket of quiet string haze, it puts the soloist through mind-boggling solo work that displays the successive ranges through the members of the recorder family, from bass to sopranino. At least twice, the soloist must play two instruments at the same time. There is not much music to it, but the flashy technical display is extraordinary.
Adams played a mishmash of encores, including an early English keyboard piece buried under tons of recorder embellishment, and the last movement of Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 2.
The second half of the program came from a different world, beginning with Gustav Holst’s brief Brook Green Suite of 1933, one of his numerous, folksy works written for student string ensemble.
The concluding substance was found in the Serenade in E-flat by Josef Suk (1874-1935), pupil and son-in-law of Antonin Dvorak. Composed in 1892, its four movements are filled with a range of warm-hearted moods, ranging from sunny joy to serene tenderness. Maestro Andrew Sewell, always ready to put heart into his conducting, treated this work with noteworthy affection, evoking beautifully shaded happiness. The players clearly joined in his delight with the music, delivering a glowing performance.
Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra concludes its season with a final concert on May 10.
