Todd Rosenberg
Dionne Jackson: agile and stylish.
The Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra had one strike-out and three home runs at its Feb. 19 concert at the Capitol Theater.
The opening item, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, was done to proper scale as chamber music, instead of as a big-orchestra piece. But that scale made it a dubious fit for a hall as large as the Capitol Theater. From where I sat, much detail was lost, and the extraordinarily long harpsichord cadenza that ends the first movement was almost inaudible.
From there on, it was steady success. Guest flautist Dionne Jackson, who was a soloist in the Bach, bravely brought us Carl Nielsen’s Flute Concerto. Nielsen planned five concertos, each meant to be a musical portrait of a member of his favorite wind quintet. He only completed two of these; the flute concerto was created in honor of Holger Gilbert-Jespersen, a gentle and fastidious person whom Nielsen chose to tease humorously with outbursts from a vulgar bass trombone. Back in 1965, I had the privilege of hearing Gilbert-Jespersen, late in his career, play this work. The match of man and music was truly uncanny.
As the guest soloist for WCO, Jackson was splendidly agile and stylish, and she was given expertly detailed backing by the orchestra under maestro Andrew Sewell.
After intermission, the orchestra played the first of the three suites for small orchestra entitled “Ancient Airs and Dances” by Ottorino Respighi — a composer identified with bombastic orchestration but who also had a gently antiquarian side. The WCO’s beautifully balanced ensemble displayed elegant clarity in this four-movement set of arrangements.
The final work was the Symphony No. 79 in F by Haydn. This is one of the less-familiar symphonies dating from before the final two dozen that audiences hear most often from the great master. It is polished and unpretentious but clever and thoroughly entertaining. In choosing it, Sewell once more displayed his devotion to Haydn the symphonist. This work has a modest scoring — there were 25 players in all: 18 on strings, seven winds. In this performance, their integration was ideally balanced, and Haydn’s repeated shifts from a string quartet to the full orchestra in the finale were particularly well presented. The playing was perfection itself. Madison is lucky to have such musicianship and programming imagination available to us.