J.'s Gig

J. played her concert with the JCC Symphony Saturday night. She gets called every now and then if a regular member of a horn section can't make a given program and they need a replacement. Thankfully they call when the orchestra first starts to rehearse a given program, not right before the concert, so she gets to rehearse for a few weeks and is not expected to sight-read unfamiliar music.

Saturday's program was actually somewhat unusual, no doubt due to the fact that the music director is a musicologist who is more interested in, well, interesting works than popular ones. They started with Weber's Oberon overture, arguably his best-known work, certainly his best-known orchestral work. The orchestra sounded pretty bad on it, mostly due to the strings. Their intonation was poor, and too many players hit too many wrong notes, creating a muddy mess.

It's always the strings that cause problems in amateur orchestras. Years ago in Arizona, when J. was a full-fledged member of the Scottsdale Symphony (it sounds more impressive than it is), the music director would hire a few professional string “mercenaries” who would show up at the last rehearsal and the concert itself and pull the rest of the sections out of the quagmire.

Next up was Chopin's E-minor piano concerto, with one Adam Neiman, apparently a professional, soloing. I always wonder how these arrangements between amateur orchestras and professional soloists work. Did they budget money to pay him his usual fee? Is he a friend of the director and did this as a favor? In any event, he was technically flawless, but I did not enjoy the performance as much as I had hoped, though this was probably not the soloist's fault. He sounded brash and strident to my years, with little lyricism and subtlety to which Chopin's music lends itself so well, but I suspect it was the contrast with the orchestra more than the pianist himself. The strings mostly got their act together on the Chopin, but even at its best, the orchestra did not have the brio and momentum of a well-rehearsed professional group, and sounded, for lack of a better word, lazy. The soloist, in the meantime, was pounding away at his usual level of energy and drive, overwhelming the accompaniment. In addition, evidently friends of the musicians get first row seats, so we were practically underneath the piano, and it was loud.

The orchestra finished the concert with Max Bruch's First Symphony, on which J. did most of her playing, and I am happy to report that it more than made up for the deficiencies of the first half. The symphony is performed extremely rarely – as far as I have been able to find out, and this was corroborated by the director, it has been recorded only twice. In fact, everything by Bruch except for the ubiquitous violin concerto and maybe the Scottish Fantasy is preformed extremely rarely. This is a pity – the Symphony is worth hearing. When J. played snippets of it for me at home (we had to download it from iTunes; none of my usual sources for CDs carried either of the two existing recordings, but iTunes, amazingly, had the Leipzig Gewandhaus with Kurt Mazur doing it), I didn't take to it right away. I felt it didn't have the gravitas of a really great symphony. I was wrong. It isn't up to the standards of the massive symphonies of Bruch's contemporaries (Brahms and Bruckner), and I guess in absolute terms it is a “lighter” work, but when heard in its entirety it is appealing. A few excellent themes, sufficiently bombastic tutti sections, and a gorgeous slow movement with a short but arresting cello solo which the JCC cellist handled well, though she looked really nervous. The strings held it together through most of the symphony, even through the fast and rhythmically difficult scherzo, and fell apart again only at the very end. All in all, a respectable performance of a work that deserves wider exposure.

The saddest part of the whole event was the audience – the already small theatre was really sparsely populated, mostly with orchestra members' friends and a few retirees from the on-site assisted living home. Sure, this is no NSO, but everyone, even the strings, was trying really hard and mostly succeeding, and anyone playing good music with their best effort deserves more attention than the JCC Orchestra got on Saturday (though in fairness, the list price of the tickets, which we didn't have to pay, was outrageously high at $20). C.&S. and K. came to the concert with me – great big thank you to them for supporting J.'s occasional musicianship.