A New Work
Some New Artists

Saturday, February 5, 2005

Westfield Symphony Orchestra, David Wroe (conductor), Boris Kucharsky (violin). Vaughan Williams: Serenade to Music (orchestral version); Robert Aldridge: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra; Brahms: Symphony no. 3 in F major, op. 90. Presbyterian Church, Westfield.

and
Saturday, April 9, 2005
By Paul M. Somers

Ron Bohmer (baritone), Christianna Bates, Emiko Edwards, and Jinhee Kim (piano). Robert S. Cohen: Edison Invents; Mozart: Piano Concerto, no. 23, K. 488, mvt. 1; Mendelssohn: Piano Concerto no. 1 in G minor, op. 25, mvt. 1; Beethoven: Piano Concerto no. 3 in C minor, op. 60, mvt. 1; Beethoven: Symphony no. 4 in B-flat major. Union County Arts Center, Rahway.

The Westfield Symphony Orchestra (WSO) this year has made a concerted attempt to put forward new music which will disprove the myth that modern music is unappealing to a general audience. In February the WSO presented the Violin Concerto of its composer-in-residence (and newly elected department chair at Montclair State University) Robert L. Aldridge. Then in April it was the turn of Robert S. Cohen of Upper Montclair, who produced a musical theater piece called Edison Invents.

Considering the goal of the WSO, both works were a resounding success; the audiences for both were appropriately effusive, applauding long and loud. Artistically, however, it was the instrumental work which was the more satisfying to these ears.

Aldridge's Violin Concerto featured Boris Kucharsky for whom it was composed, so right away there was helpful level of familiarity from the performer. It is a dramatic work using the standard three movements of a concerto. Anyone who knows how to listen to music can readily find their way through its performance since Aldridge does not attempt to be obscure: expressive motives are there to be followed, and their discourse within the work exposes the composer's ability to fulfill expectations one moment then take a surprise turn a few moments later.

If one wished to use other works to put across the general feel of the work to someone who had not heard it, one could certainly latch on to the high tremolo strings of the slow movement as reminding one of Sibelius' concerto and the final Presto as taking the same incredible speed and making the same technical demands as Barber's. But both analogies are unfair to Aldridge. The sound of the work remains consistently his own, derivative only inasmuch as it is neo-romantic with the long line as important as details in bringing each movement toward a climactic goal.

Kucharsky's trip through the big first movement cadenza was spectacular. But more telling throughout was his use of vibrato as a tool, not a constant companion. We would love to hear his generous sound again.

Cohen's one-man stage work was more a patchwork of identifiable borrowings: many scraps of Sondheim-ism, here a generic tone cluster, there an old-fashioned resounding triad, and always the sense that this was Broadway, even at its most "advanced." I don't mean to invoke the word "Broadway" as some kind of curse. But it has become an identifiable genre and thus always runs the risk of stylistic self reference, and there was that aplenty in this ambitious more-or-less forty-minute one-man show.

Ron Bohmer, a Broadway veteran, was certainly prepared and energetic as Thomas Edison. It was probably for the best that there was no attempt to make him look like the inventor, but instead let him be Edison by going as far inside the character as the production would allow.

Librettist/director Herschel Garfein certainly set forth in exposition a number of threads to follow in this nonlinear biography. The one he settled on the most was, indeed, the one which could and should speak to today's audience: to whom was Edison married' His wife Mary or his work' This same split in loyalties is the most destructive plague of the modern corporate white-collar world (surely the audience for whom this was written) and should have resonated with those forced to work longer hours and neglect their family lives as a result.

Instead, what Garfein and Cohen have as the final tour-de-force scene is all surface. We see Edison dashing about juggling his commitments to this invention and that, this company and that, and promising his wife he would show up at home, then going back on his word. But it is all about the bustling around, not about who he has become. There is no moment when the driven character has a revealing, humanizing moment and confronts himself with who he is. All we get is him as an old man looking back at the end of his life and singing with a wistfully floated high tone the name of his long deceased wife Mary. The show concludes with his regret, but neither librettist nor composer reaches deeper. What is needed is a touch of mature Verdi, the equivalent if you will of Don Carlos IV:1, where King Philip is forced to ask himself who he is and at the end of the scene Princess Eboli, too, must answer questions about who she is and why. Self confrontation could have raised Edison Invents to a level far beyond mere surface energy. As it is, the score itself often sounds like the generic "industrial" background music to an Edison documentary in a museum.

Throughout the performance, the WSO played the difficult music as well as one could want. Mr. Wroe was clearly on top of the score as cues were sharp and his contact with Rohmer was, of course, quite visible to the audience, since the actor performed on stage in front of the orchestra.

Far more important to the future of music was the presentation in the same concert of three young women who had won a piano concerto competition (each in their own age group) and were thus presented playing with the WSO. Christianna Bates (in the 12-year-old and under class) was beyond merely charming as she played Mozart. Her touch was perfect, her phrasing immaculate (doubtless the result of fine coaching by her teacher), and her stage presence ultra-poised.

Emiko Edwards was the winner in the 14-and-under group. She whipped into Mendelssohn's G minor first movement with fiery playing to match the romantic period's worship of the conquering hero. The lyric second theme was filled with nuance, and the *passage work's virtuosic demands were met.

Jinhee Kim, the 18-and-under winner, let loose with a big sound and impassioned playing as she tackled the first movement of eethoven's C minor concerto. Though all three pianists played from memory, Jinhee alone knew to put down the music rack on the piano, a small sign before she played one note that she understood how things should be presented. She knew the piece cold and gave it everything she had, which included taking chances and dropping some notes - a few more than one would like, but she has time to pick them up before her next foray before an orchestra and an audience so large. She certainly has something to say to an audience.

The April concert concluded with one of the most engaging performances of Beethoven's Symphony no. 4 in B-flat that we can remember. Of all the orchestral soloists, the lovely phrasing of clarinetist William Shadel in this "clarinetist's" symphony was memorable, though all the other soloists were excellent as usual. This ensemble's sense of matching sound was most present in the Adagio, where in the *coda the melody moves from one voice to another with only the most subtle differences in color. Of course the most awaited solo, not only for its humor but for its technical demand, was the passage in the zippy finale where the bassoon must tongue every note at nearly science-fiction speeds. James Jeter carried it off perfectly.

Wroe, too, had some moments where his own ideas, though far from quirky, were apparent. The finale provided him the opportunity to be extra expressive in a wholly appropriate manner. The coda has a passage where the solo winds each play a portion of the melody, each one slower than the previous. Wroe did it as if a massive clock were running down and nearly brought the whole mechanism to a cold stop. Then it jumped back to tempo and finished in a flash. This clockwork image, either working or running down, is one familiar to comic-opera goers. Whether the tick-tock in the heads of the characters of a Rossini Act I finale, or E. T. A. Hoffmann's and Offenbach's mechanical doll Olympia, or even the bird in Stravinsky's Song of the Nightingale, the ultimate failure of mechanical imitation as compared to the natural real thing is a device which was highlighted to the maximum by Wroe's exaggerated "winding down."

This "failure" of the mechanical device, which became a 19th century metaphor for the downside of the Industrial Revolution and the Machine Age, proved to be the perfect conclusion to a concert which had begun by exhibiting the failure of relationships for the quintessential inventor, Thomas Edison. Beethoven, who after all knew enough about musicmaking machines to have composed Wellington's Victory for a clockwork device two centuries ago, as it turns out conceived the clockwork passage in the Symphony no. 4 with a sense of humor which would have fit well into the Musical Theater genre and in its metaphoric impact would have been more effective as a "moral" to Edison Invents than what was composed.

The February concert opened with British native Wroe at home with Vaughan Williams as the less familiar all-instrumental version of Serenade to Music was played. If one knows the choral version, it is definitely more successful. And yet in this version the violin solo still puts the ear in mind of The Lark Ascending, and the trumpet and horn calls still sound like the genesis of Britten's glittering "Nocturne" from his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. Vaughan Williams' extraordinary orchestration again reminded the ear that he studied with Ravel.

Brahms' Symphony no. 3 in F major concluded the February concert. It is the most difficult of his symphonies because it is the most delicate, the most in need of careful balance. In the oddball acoustics of the Westfield Presbyterian Church who could say anything conclusive about anything on the program? But Aldridge and Vaughan Williams, even when writing coloristically, have done much of the work themselves, and it comes out fairly well. But Brahms, who is more enigmatic, needs management. Should the horns dominate the opening measures? or the woodwinds? or, most difficult of all, should they all be balanced to sound like a single composite instrument? It's tough to make the decision work in any acoustic.

So one must be consoled by my favorite Brahms quote, one which he - a bristly sort of fellow - probably meant sardonically, but which we can reinterpret benevolently. After hearing an Italian orchestra play the Third, he was asked how he liked it. "Well, it works that way, too," he replied.