When Democracy Isn’t Good Enough

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The New York Sun

The lean and leaderless ensemble Orpheus may be considered less remarkable for what it is than for what it is not. Conductorless in this age of celebrity, it survives rather on solid, time-honored principles of communication and egalitarianism. The Vienna Philharmonic may indeed be a self-governing body, but at every performance they are still only a set of tools – albeit pearl-handled ones – for a particular craftsman. The members of Orpheus, on the other hand, are the decision makers, achieving a happy medium between orchestral servitude and chamber music democracy. Uncompromising in their community approach, they rotate concertmasters for every piece and take downbeats from quarters other than the first violin chair.


In Orpheus’s season-opener at Trinity Church on Thursday, two small chamber groups offered reductive iterations of the music of Dvoryak and Brahms. Any orchestra can send a few players out to perform chamber music, but this quintet and nonet bore the unmistakable stamp of Orpheus, with cellist Melissa Meell signaling the cues for each movement of the Brahms Serenade No. 1.


In this early work, Brahms struggled with the notion of orchestral density, producing a relatively thin work to express the perfumed charms of evening at the same time as he finished the much thicker First Piano Concerto. The premier serenade was written for only eight instruments and was offered by Orpheus in a nine-player reconstruction (with doubled clarinets) by Alan Boustead. Listening to this version helped me appreciate the clean lines of the full orchestral arrangement, where integral melodic passages are often delegated to individual players. But the performance left me wanting.


Although this rendition did justice to the music on the printed page, there was a palpable lack of spirit to the reading as a whole. The opening Allegro molto had little of the rollicking sense of the sea shanty and the rough-and-tumble background of this individualistic composer from Hamburg. Gone was the expansive impoliteness of the movement, replaced by a dutiful but uninteresting sense of metronomic decorum.


The Adagio non troppo was weak as well. Again the notes were there, but there was no feeling for a building process leading to that stunning and sunny modulation that stamps this bauble with the mark of genius. Dynamic contrast was simply ignored. At first, I thought the echoing acoustics at the church and the sparseness of the arrangement were to blame, but slowly I came to the conclusion that these players were simply adopting a gingerly approach to this music – no harm, no foul. Their carefulness did indeed pay off in terms of accurate enunciation, but at what price?


There was one magical moment when the bells of the church blended with the dying breaths of the musicians in this warmly constructed slow movement, but it was hardly enough to rescue the piece from this tedious interpretation. The two minuets were surprisingly humorless, the Rondo-Allegro flat and colorless. Orpheus can do much better.


The program began with a sweet and lovely realization of Dvoryak’s Nocturne in D Major, Op. 40 for string quintet. Brahms’s most famous protege was going through the same thick versus thin compositional decision-making process when he composed this piece in the same year as his Serenade for Winds. Here the five Orphic players blended expertly, led by concertmistress Eriko Sato. But the piece was less than five minutes long and only tantalized with beauty that would be sorely lacking in the main work.


I would have wished for a little more spirit in the performance as a whole, and couldn’t help thinking that the addition of – dare I say it? – a conductor might have enlivened matters just a tad. George Szell once went nose to nose with a string player during a rehearsal in Cleveland. He screamed at the fellow, in front of the entire ensemble, “Why can’t you play more relaxed!” Sometimes, you simply need a tyrant.


The New York Sun

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