Last Saturday New York’s Orpheus Chamber Orchestra visited Oberlin, bringing with them a mixed program spanning two centuries with pieces by Joseph Haydn and Elliot Carter.
The ensemble is celebrating its 30th season and has had a colorful career that includes an extensive recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon, world tours and an annual concert series at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Their recordings with Grammophon include collaborations with excellent soloists like Mischa Maisky and Richard Goode.
One of the only orchestras in the world that performs without a conductor, Orpheus is founded on a philosophy of mutual respect and musical involvement. Players rotate through soloist and leadership positions and everyone is welcome to comment on musical decisions in rehearsal, making for a very democratic system of preparing and interpreting repertoire. The rehearsals must be successful because the sound that the orchestra produces is phenomenal yet subtle and controlled.
Orpheus opened the concert with Haydn’s Symphony No. 73 in D major “La Chasse.” The subtitle for this symphony comes from the last movement labeled La Chasse: Presto which originally was the overture to his opera La Fedelta Premiata. Despite the small size of the orchestra and the lack of a conductor — both historically accurate performance conditions — the playing and phrasing were influenced by a more romantic style. There was plenty of subtle phrasing and impeccable communication. The basses sounded especially warm, filling out the bottom of the orchestra very nicely, and they had a balanced, full tone that was stronger than most orchestras twice their size.
Following the symphony by Haydn, Orpheus featured violinist Eric Wyrick in a performance of Mendelssohn’s celebrated E minor Violin Concerto, Op. 64.
Wyrick has an impressive resume. He began studying with the famous Julliard violin professor Dorothy DeLay at the age of six, has sat in the concertmaster’s seat of many fine orchestras, and has performed chamber music extensively.
Surprisingly Wyrick’s playing during Saturday’s concert was average at best. The most obvious and detrimental mistake he made was to bring the music on stage with him. Memorizing concerti for public performance is a standard professional procedure and is a fairly logical expectation.
If a performer can’t play a piece from memory then it certainly isn’t ready for public performance. This was especially embarrassing because the Mendelssohn Concerto is such a canonized piece that you could ask almost any conservatory violinist to play it from memory and they would be able to.
It was obvious that the piece was under-rehearsed, and the performance might have slipped by a less discerning audience, but playing that way in front of a crowd of aspiring musicians just didn’t work. His intonation was troublesome, and his tone was occasionally shrill.
The last movement was especially sloppy. Wyrick’s tone was scratchy and he was constantly running out of bow on the upbow stacatto sections. Wyrick has technical and musical potential. No doubt he has performed brilliantly in the past. Perhaps he was filling in for an alternative soloist at short notice. For whatever reason, Wyrick and the Opheus Orchestra chose the wrong audience to slip by with a mediocre performance.
It was disappointing, especially because this concerto rarely gets performed the way it could. Young violinists often pair it with the Bruch G minor concerto for one of their first recordings and many people consider it a sort of stepping stone towards more important pieces like the Sibelius, Brahms, Beethoven and Shostakovich concerti. Only a couple of recordings give this piece the attention that it deserves.
After the intermission, the ensemble returned to play Sibelius’s Valse Triste, Op. 44, No. 1. Sibelius originally wrote this piece as part of a collection of incidental music for a play entitled Kuolema (Death) by Arvid Jarnefelt, the composer’s brother in-law. As the program notes stated, "The plot involves an ailing widow who has a feverish dream of dancers entering her sick room. She joins them in a graceful waltz, but it tires her and they leave. She awakens and resumes the dance, but the specter of Death, disguised as her dead husband, knocks on the door and takes her life as well."
Orpheus’s performance of this piece was gorgeous, expressive, even charming, and very well prepared, but was also eerie and cold. They upheld these two opposing feelings very successfully. The group took lots of rubatos and other liberties with tempo but the ensemble was perfect and all interpretive decisions
were effective.
Despite the short duration of the piece and its relatively light, simple melodies and instrumentation, this piece was, in many ways, the gem of the concert. It was during this piece that the subtleties of the ensemble came through most clearly.
Orpheus closed their concert with Elliot Carter’s Symphony No. 1. Many concert-goers associate Carter with his later atonal works that are extremely intellectual and very difficult for the lay-listener to follow.
Perhaps when the orchestra was deciding on a program they included the Sibelius Valse Triste to entice skeptical listeners into staying for the second half of the concert.
However, while composing the symphony, Carter was interacting with Aaron Copland and was interested in producing music that, like much of Copland’s, had a popular appeal. Traces of Copland’s influence are very obvious throughout the piece and, for those who love Copland, it made the piece a delight to hear.
The orchestra’s performance of the piece was flawless, robust and exciting. All of the rhythmically complicated figures were executed with no problems, and the piece served as a wonderful finale to an inspirational concert.