Word: hro
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This was the concert the Harvard musical world has been waiting for. More than that of the Glee Club or even the HRO, it was slated to be the highlight of the concert season. John C. Adams is the most professional and professionally-minded student conductor Harvard has seen in half a dozen years. In addition he has won respect as a solo clarinetist and chamber musician. Daniel Troob, the excellent continuo-player in Adams's superb production of The Marriage of Figaro, was to team up with him again as the soloist in the Mozart Piano Concerto...
People usually come to hear the HRO parti pris, but Friday night the orchestra surprised even its most faithful adherents. The first movement of the Beethoven exhibited a string section that was competent and solidly in control despite purported despoliation by this year's Bach Society Orchestra. Under conductor James Yannatos, the orchestra played with just the right kind of classical clarity and transparence. These qualities are more difficult to master than the rhythmic complexities of contemporary music or the pyrotechnics of late nineteenth-century orchestral style. All the elements which are so important in Beethoven--dynamic contrast, elegance...
...were between two chestnuts, could not help but be a musical gourmet's delight. Written in a disjunct, motivic style that borrows almost as much from jazz as from serial technique, they presented problems of cohesion and continuity similar to those of the Dallapiccola 'Cello Concerto performed by the HRO last spring. This time, however, the orchestra succeeded. Rather than struggling frantically through the notes, the players were in sufficient control of the music to interpret it and make it come alive...
...make no mistake: this year's HRO is a very different orchesra from its predecessors. Technically it is not appreciablly better, but this year the group has all those qualities that musicians prize most highly. There is dynamic control that can achieve a real piano, and a multi-levelled sound far beyond the crude polarity of loud and soft. Gone are the days when the winds thought so much of themselves and so little of the strings that the latter were helpless before the barrage of their sound. This year the strings are playing out and assuming their proper role...
This year's HRO is doing something with the music. The difference between Tschaikovsky and last year's Brahms third was phenomenal. Instead of plowing dutifully through the notes at a nondescript mezzo volume, they are seizing the music by guts and expressing it. The tacit thought behind their playing is no longer "see what I can do," but rather "see what I can say." It's about time...