Song of a Reformed Headhunter

We heard our last Orpheus Chamber Orchestra concert last night, at Carnegie. The program had a hodge-podge feel to it: Franz Shreker's Scherzo for Strings, Beethoven's Romance No. 2 in F major for Violin and Orchestra, Henry Vieuxtemps's Violin Concerto No. 5 in A minor and Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor. The new commission, Alex Mincek's Pendulum IX: "Machina/Humana," written in a modernist idiom and in homage to Monteverdi's L'Orfeo , amplified the discord. The highlight of the concert, the Munich-born Viviane Hagner playing Vieuxtemps, was a superb memory to set alongside that of Gil Shaham playing with the orchestra at our first concert. Hagner was not a flashy player; she was, instead, deeply absorbing and utterly compelling. So was the orchestra accompanying her with passionate attention. The performance was in sharp contrast with the blandly professional rendition of Beethoven's Romance No. 2. Neither soloist nor orchestra seemed ...

Heard Orpheus Chamber Orchestra again last night, at Carnegie Hall. Did not care very much for the score or the playing of Tippett's Divertimento on "Sellinger's Round" with its English musical allusions.  Jean-Yves Thibaudet, the French pianist, came on next to play, with Louis Hanzlik on trumpet, Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 1 in C minor. First time I heard the piano concerto, and I loved it for its youthful brio. It brimmed with ideas and moved with zip. Thibaudet was poetic where the music was poetic and brash where it was brash. A tad too civilized, perhaps, but that might be my prejudice against the French. After the intermission, we heard Honegger's languorous evocation of a summer morning. Pastorale d’été was quite lovely, if not exactly ground-breaking. Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings concluded the program. Lush and sentimental. I hated it. I thought the musicians were on auto-pilot. Here was where an original interpreter--a conductor, ...

Last night GH and I attended the opening night of a new season of music by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. The highlight of the evening for me was Haydn's Symphony No. 73 in D Major (The Hunt), played with thrilling color and dancing rhythm. The disappointment was Brahms' Violin Concerto in D Major, with Gil Shaham. The first two movements were too slow, and lost the drama of the work. Shaham was clear and delicate in the quieter passages but did not bring out the architecture of the concerto. The evening began with Mendelssohn's Fair Melusina Overture . The program note explains: In medieval folklore, Melusina was a beautiful girl cursed to take the form of a mermaid one day each week. She married the knight Reymund, and forbade him from ever seeing her on Saturdays. He betrayed her one fateful day, spying on her in the bath, and she disappeared forever from sight of humans, although the sound of her wailing remained. The music went from a rolling "water" the...

TB and I heard Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall last night. Founded in 1972, the self-governing ensemble performs without a conductor, rotating musical leadership roles for each work. The program last night: Schumann's Overture to Hermann and Dorothea , Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor , Krzysztof Penderecki's Serenade , and Brahms's Serenade No. 2 in A major . I enjoyed the first and third movements of the Prokofiev, but was hooked by the Penderecki. From the program note: "There are Baroque leanings in the opening Passacaglia , referencing the compositional technique that builds variations over a constant repeated pattern. Penderecki's Passacaglia roils the underlying ground, but nearly every figure shares the distinguished stamp of three chromatic notes rising or falling, the layers interwoven with imitation and counterpoint. The Larghetto , with its lush harmonies and emotional intensity nods to the great string serenades of the 19t...