UW Gazette, January 15, 1997 Conducted by Jan Narveson Thumbnails of performances stretching back to mid- December open this first entry of Cecilia 1997. December 18: The Nutcracker ballet by Ballet Jorgen, with K-W Symphony conducted by Laurie Anne Hunter, sometime resident of K-W and Associate Conductor of The Phantom of the Opera, after a slightly shaky opening soon became cohesive enough, and there were exceptional moments, as in the sultry turns of the Arabian dance in Act 2. Even more than last year, its tiny company of 16 did a remarkably ingenious job of keeping the stage lively and interesting at all times, and all in all the performance on this day did considerable justice to this enchanting score. December 21: Howard Dyck and the Philharmonic Choir, very much aided by the K-W Symphony, came up with yet another fine Messiah, especially because of a team of out standing soloists. Mezzo Jennifer Lane was excellent, yet the least of this formidable foursome. Our own Daniel Lichti, bass, was in excellent voice - secure and thrilling in "The Trumpet Shall Sound" (with Larry Larson, piccolo trumpet, splendidly seconding). Veteran tenor Mark DuBois's opening "Comfort Ye" and "Every Valley" were simply models of how these things should be done, the voice as always sweet and clear, but with a useful extra measure of heft where needed as well. "Sleeper" of the occasion was soprano Meredith Hall, whose praises we have had occasion to sing before, but never in such a degree as this. She is very, very special; for she not only has mastered all of the very considerable technical requirements of these pieces, but her voice has that total sincerity and enchanting naivete that simply sweep the listener up into a rapture. In fact, we have never enjoyed any soprano so much in all the perhaps five dozen live performances, and many recordings we have ever heard. It was revelatory, and the whole evening would have been worthwhile even if all the rest had been pikers - which they were anything but. Choir, conductor, and or chestra were commendable and rather more, and give or take a detail put in a splendid effort. January 3: KWCMS's first concert of the New Year was an atypical one, presenting The Gavriella String Quartet, four high-school students (including two UW faculty daughters): Leslie Ting and Julia Narveson, violins; Clara LeRoy, viola; Amber Ghent, cello. They took on a mightily ambitious program: Mendelssohn, Op. 12 in Eb and Shostakovich, No. 1; the Dvorak Waltz, Op 54/1, and John Lurie's Bella by Barlight. Fatherly pride being a factor here, we tapped the expertise of long-time chamber music fan Larry Cummings of Pure Math, who allowed as how the youngsters had "done justice" to the Shostakovich, "captured very well the tentative and nostalgic nature" of the Lurie, and when they got to the Mendelsssohn, after intermission, "the hesitancy of the first half of the concert completely vanished in what truly approached a very professional performance of this work. The Gavriella easily captured the warm, almost folk- like, melodies of the quartet and earned a well-deserved round of applause." We aren't going to take issue with any of that, but would add that this was a very nervous set of young ladies on their first no-holds-barred program of serious music, and we were impressed at how little this affected their playing. Members of the audience expressed a fervent hope that these girls will continue to work together Sunday, January 5: The KWS Serenade Series opened their year with music of Schubert and Mozart, except for the items played by visiting superstar trombonist Alain Trudel, whose Eb trombone tone in Albrechtsberger's concerto was pure ambrosia, and whose account of the unbelievably difficult concerto, "Figabone" by Anthony Rankovic was, well, unbelievable. (Just to keep any residual tendency toward credibility at bay, he added his astounding rendition of the Flight of The Bumblebee, which shouldn't be possible on a slide trombone - but he did it anyway.) For the rest, Chosei Komatsu led the KWS in what can best be described as a "rousing" performance of Schubert's Rosamunde overture - but admirably balanced and splendidly played by our orchestra. The bit of ballet music and the Entr'acte from the rest of the incidental music to Rosamunde didn't impress so much. From Mozart we had a crisp and delightful Marriage of Figaro overture - full marks for that one. "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" was a touch too hard-nosed. though again beautifully performed. Visiting concertmaster Martin Foster was most welcome in that position, and put in a couple of very nice solos. All in all, this was a successful program, and the only blemish is that the conductor forgot to point out, in his announcements, that January is the month of the birth of both those composers. January 8: Again at KWCMS Music Room, Jeremy Findlay, cello and Ellen Braslavsky, piano performed a much better program than the one originally and, as it turned out, mis takenly advertised. Beethoven's biggest sonata, No. 3 in A, and Brahms's no. 2 in F, sandwiched two sleepers: Larysa Kuzmenko's sonata, A Dream within a Dream, and Janacek's only work for cello, Pohadka (Fairy Tale). The first of these latter proved to be a stunner. It's a powerhouse of a work, and admirably crafted for the instruments; wispy, gossamer dream segments alternate with what presumably was a nightmare or at least a mighty adventure, and do so in a way that makes eminent musical sense. We hope she's gotten some major prize for this remarkable work, and if not it must have been because they didn't hear it with Mr. Findlay and Ms. Braslavsky at the wheel, for they gave it an ideal performance, which was received by the audience with a storm of applause - how often does that happen with a new work? The Janacek work is, as one might expect, subtle and eloquent. The two big sonatas, meanwhile, both got very strong performances, the Beethoven grand and commanding, the Brahms passionate and intense. Since we were all ready to hear fine work from this cellist, his excellence was no surprise, but Ms. Braslavsky was new to us, and proved to be a major "find". She's a diminutive dynamo: her control of dynamics, from ppp to fff, and her crisp, thrillingly clean scale passages were a joy to hear. The two together, then, constitute one of the day's formidable duos. Even after a very long program, they came up with an encore, the first of Schumann's pieces in folkstyle for cello, in a most beautiful account. Jeremy Findlay and Ellen Braslavsky: names to remember, folks! Friday, January 10: At the Music Room, the Penderecki Quartet performed its only KWCMS concert this season not devoted to Bartok. What a pleasure to hear their full-bod ied, perfectly balanced, and lively account of Haydn's Op 50, #6, a new item in their repertoire. Maybe their frogs, in the finale, could have croaked a bit more blatantly, but otherwise this was an ideal Haydn performance.Gavin Bryars, which we mistakenly took to be an Auschwitz victim but is an active contemporary composer, has produced one of the rare (in our opinion) successes in the "minimalist" vein - mainly by just barely being it and introducing interesting episodes and changes of mood in his Quartet No. 1, entitled "between the National and the Bristol" (which probably depicts, as one audience member conjectured, a slightly tipsy journey from one pub to another). Near the other end of that spectrum was Victor Ullman's Qt. #3, written in a German concentration camp, prior to his own extermination there in 1944. Reminiscent of Zemlinsky or early Schoenberg, its intense meditations were varied enough and in clear enough form to make this an interesting entry. Both of these pieces were consummately performed. Beethoven's last quartet, Op. 135 in F, is a very special item, being light-hearted late Beethoven apart from its slow movement, a marvellous and luminous essay on the model of the cavatina of Op. 130. Piotr Buczek played the first violin melody here with quiet, grave beauty - a distinguished performance. Elsewhere, we thought their effort more successful than in last summer's QuartetFest account, though the scherzo seemed a bit too timid. But while there's a bit more to say, what they did say was beautifully said. The general performance level of the Penderecki Quartet is so high that one gets spoiled by them; in terms of tonal beauty, power, balance, and intonation, they hold their own against any quartet in the world today. As we've pointed out before, we in this community are extremely fortunate to have them around. Saturday: The KWS Pops concerts presented one of their rare up-scale programs, all classics. That's a dicey thing to do with our pops audiences, but this one was successful, its success being very much aided by the presence of National Ballet stars Kimberly Glasco and Aleksandar Antonijevic, who are one of the most beautiful twosomes we've ever seen on the ballet stage, and performed the pas de deux from Swan Lake, and the Balcony Scene from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, with lustrous perfection and wonderful facial expression (not a small thing in the dance medium). But the K-W Symphony proved eminently worthy of these talents, playing with polish, flair, and precision. Visiting concertmaster (from the TSO) Arkady Yenevker and our own John Helmers, cello, did the violin and cello solos in the pas de deux most beautifully, with great delicacy and poignancy. Elsewhere in the program, there were three more bits from Swan Lake, of which we'll single out the Dance of the Little Swans, where our oboists got it exactly right, with inimitable charm. Chosei Komatsu is right at home with this sort of repertoire, and got good service from his players in the Polovtsian Dances by Borodin, Rachmaninoff's Vocalise, Mussourgsky's Night on Bald Mountain (which somehow didn't go over with this audience), Gliere's Russian Sailors' Dance, the Kabalevsky Comedians' Galop, and of course the 1812 Overture, complete with electronic cannon, which worked rather better this time, but the Centre's system is short on transient capability - pretty mushy cannons. In fact, what really impressed in this performance was the excellent precision of the strings in the many very racy passages in this potboiler. Forthcoming: Friday: An unusual offering from KWCMS and NuMus presents the team of Udo Kasemets and Susan Layard, piano and soprano, at KWCMS Music Room in a program devoted mainly to works of "the velvet gentleman", Eric Satie: especially his dramatic cantata, Sokratie, with lyrics by Plato from several Dialogues (Symposium, Phaedrus, and Phaedo - the death scene). Besides that major work, there's Sports et Divertissements for piano, with drawings by Charles Martin and mesostics by John Cage; Ludions (Five Songs to poems by Leon Paul Fargus) and one piece by Kasemets: Fractal Epitaph, for John Cage. Tickets at $15 (students/srs. $10; students at the door, without reservations, $8.) Proceeds of this benefit concert go to both sponsoring organizations, for the performance of contemporary music. Tickets are available at UW Box Office, WordsWorth and Reader's Ink bookstores, or by reservation (886-1673) or at the door, space permitting. Friday and Saturday: The K-W Symphony Masterworks concert for January has the outstanding Canadian pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin playing the Gershwin piano concerto. (Hamelin has, despite his youth, an already legendary reputation among fellow pianists for breathtaking feats of virtuosity.) Excerpts from a work by the not-well-known but very charming Spanish composer Ernesto Halffter, Don Lindos de Almeria; Copland's lovely Appalachian Spring - perhaps the most beautiful orchestral work by an American composer - and Harry Freedman's Excerpts from Oiseaux Exotiques complete this very unusual program. We'll note that our conductor, Chosei Komatsu, has a special flair for Spanish music. Tuesday, January 21: The WLU noon-hour concert (12:00, in the Recital Hall) features the Penderecki Quartet again, in the Bartok #4, with analysis by Charles Morrison. (See January 23, below.) Wednesday, January 22: The KWS Great Composers series is Mainly Mozart: the Symphony No. 38 ("Prague") and the cantata Exultate jubilate, with Catherine Sayers, soprano; and a concerto for double-bass by Cimador (who isn't mentioned in any of our standard sources), the soloist being George Greer of the KWS bass section. Thursday, January 23: The Penderecki Quartet plays the second of its three evening concerts devoted to the Bartok String Quartets, at KWCMS Music Room. Quartets nos. 3 and 4, which are the most revolutionary and probably the most popular of the six, are on the program; illustrated commentary by Prof. Charles Morrison of WLU Faculty of Music again precedes the performances.