Word: bache
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Never were these extremes more in evidence than in the Bach Society Orchestra's concert last Saturday night. Apparently set on shedding its all-Baroque image, the BSO performed a quarter of works representing every major stylistic period from the Baroque to the twentieth century. The program consisted of the instrumental sinfoniae from three J.S. Bach contatas, Wagner's Sieg-fried Idyll in its original instrumentation, Quiet City by Aaron Copland, and Beethoven's Eighth Symphony. It was the most ingenious program assembled at Harvard in the past several years. These works, all scored for a chamber orchestra, were ostensibly...
...after a good start in the first Bach sinfonia, the orchestra began having trouble. Failing to complement a fine oboe solo by Robert Hecker, the strings evidenced poor, high-schoolish intonation in the second and third sinfoniae and in general let the music control them. The sinfoniae were further flawed by a glaring absence of dynamic contrast and formal clarity...
...Idyll's original performance was by a minimum of musicians strung along the stairway of the Wagner villa. In a misguided attempt at authenticity, Hathaway eliminated most of the Bach Society's already small complement of strings. Without security in numbers. the string players were cowed by the infamous intonation problems of this highly chromatic piece...
...Aaron Copland's Quiet City (1940), the Bach Society had the advantage of two fine wind players. Alan Pease's trumpet was as "nervous" as is called for in the score, and Fred Fox's English horn was properly dark and seductive. The strings handled their part with a minimum of painful intonation and a good deal of taste. All in all Quiet City was the most successful of the works attempted, evocative where the others were dutiful...
Last week viewers also could watch and listen to the last in a series of unadorned but affecting performances of Bach's six Brandenburg concertos; this week they will see a taped special production of Eugene Onegin. Cathy Come Home, a recent drama about the British housing shortage, so electrified audiences with its high-voltage indictment of bureaucratic bungling that it prompted headline stories in the Times and the Guardian and a political debate. Scolded Opposition Leader Ted Heath: "Government action of the wrong kind can spell out doom for the Cathys of this world...