An Adagio Accented By Sad Remembrance

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The New York Sun

American conductor Leonard Slatkin found himself in London on September 11, 2001, and understandably wished that he were home instead. Preparing to lead the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the first night of the Proms concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, he altered the program to open with the Adagio for Strings of Samuel Barber.

Over time, this movement from a string quartet has taken on a life of its own and was the solemn opening work on Monday, September 11, 2006, as the Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players presented a very moving afternoon at Good Shepherd Church. Mei Ying, volunteer factotum (her own description of her all-encompassing status at the organization), offered an extremely well–planned bill of fare, and in her opening remarks pointed out that Jupiter founder Jens Nygaard died less than two weeks after the terrorist attacks, and that the firehouse in front of the church lost 11 of its brave men on that horrible day.

Of course, Mr. Slatkin employed the full string forces of his orchestra to handle the Barber Adagio five years ago, but for this performance, the piece returned to its roots as an elegy for quartet. Violinists Sergey Ostrovsky and Lisa Shihoten, violist Dov Scheindlin, and former cellist of the American String Quartet Margo Tatgenhorst Drakos played with a great deal of sensitive power, the cello in particular agonizingly resonant and disturbingly eloquent. Tommaso Albinioni’s Adagio in G minor may have been espoused by better directors — notably Peter Weir and Orson Welles, while Barber has only Oliver Stone to his credit — but in this particular context, the emotional level was very high. As often happens at New York concerts, sirens were heard from the street midway through the performance, but on this day the effect was almost too much to bear.

So what was the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 doing on this program? Good question, answered quite convincingly by harpsichordist extraordinaire Gerald Ranck.There is simply no more uplifting piece in the entire literature, and none that shares its utter sense of joy more generously. This was certainly the case in this snappy performance, in which Mr. Ranck and the quartet were augmented by bassist Kurt Muroki and by flutist Barry Crawford.

The first part of the program was necessarily a bit on the short side, because after intermission the Jupiter players honored the heroic dead with a complete performance of Mozart’s Requiem Mass. This was not your father’s Requiem, but rather an arrangement for string quartet fashioned by Peter Lichtenthal, a medical doctor who studied in Vienna, but practiced in Milan, Italy. Good friends with Wolfie’s son Karl, Lichtenthal arranged many of the master’s works for smaller groups so that he could introduce this new-fangled contemporary music to the northern Italian public. The Requiem is his most ambitious work and must be heard to be believed.

The first experience that the listener undergoes is a spiritual one indeed. Of course, since the instrumentation consists only of a string quartet, there are no words. And yet, I heard the words as distinctly as if they were being physically sung — with the added enhancement that in my mind the choir was always on pitch. And lest you think this a hallucination unique to this reviewer, the author of an essay on Dr. Lichtenthal discusses this same, very ghostly phenomenon.

Musically, the piece varies a bit in its adaptability. Sections in which the instruments are paramount in the original, the tuba mirum, for example, work very well in this thickly constructed, compact version. Others in which the singing is dominant are open to a spirited debate, although it did occur to me to mention that Mr. Scheindlin has an exceptionally pleasing singing line. Still others, such as the Confutatis maledictis, simply don’t measure up.

But this performance was really quite good, notable for its unhurried sense of development and its thoughtful balance. At just over 45 minutes, there was an awful lot of ground to cover — the performance was also repeated in the evening — and it is legitimate to ask if this piece is simply a historical curiosity or the most significant writing for string quartet before late Beethoven. Whatever its musicological value, it was certainly fitting and proper for such a hallowed occasion.

Returning Mozart’s Requiem Mass to a church was a splendid idea. All of us grieve in our own way — I still have friends who can’t bring themselves to go downtown to look at the sight of the attack — but, for me, this experience was not only cathartic, but beautiful, transcending even the wonder of the music itself.


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