Certain folks -- people of unquestioned character, remarkable intelligence and sterling taste -- were able to forego the attractions of watching Monica Lewinsky interviewed by Barbara Walters last Wednesday night. Nearly 1,000 of them were to be found in Kraushaar Auditorium at Goucher College, listening to the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra.
The orchestra performed an interesting program that mixed neglected symphonies by Haydn (No. 8 in G) and Mozart (No. 33 in B-flat) with the last of the latter's pianos concertos (No. 27 in B-flat).
The BCO has always been a crackerjack orchestra, and music director Anne Harrigan's leadership suggested that she is continuing to grow as a conductor. Certainly, she gave a fine performance of Mozart's Symphony No. 33, the most unjustly neglected of the composer's later symphonies. The phrasing of the slow movement had a natural flow, the minuet an unaffected intimacy of character, and the outer movements, while not exactly elegant, were brisk and exciting.
The performance was marred only by a lack of sure-footedness at the end of the final movement. The movement is marked "allegro assai" (or "fast enough"), and under Harrigan's rather faster tempo, the orchestra's ensemble threatened momentarily to become unglued.
If she was slightly less impressive in Haydn's Symphony No. 8 (the third in the symphonic triptych called "Le Matin," "Le Midi" and "Le Soir"), the individual contributions of some of her players more than compensated for the lack of voltage coming from the podium.
Haydn designed this early symphony as much to stimulate his solo players as to please his employers, the Esterhazys. Some of the instrumental exchanges between the players, particularly those between concertmaster Craig Richmond and first cellist Seth Low, were ravishing.
It is not meant as a slight to Wendy Chen, the soloist in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 27, to say that she didn't have a clue about what to do. Because this is the last piano concerto ever written by history's greatest master of the piano-and-orchestra genre, it has been endowed with an undeservedly high reputation.
There are a few pianists in every generation -- hats off to them -- who manage to persuade audiences that K. 595 expresses a foreboding of the composer's death and, even, a foretaste of the joys of heaven. But to most sensible listeners, it suggests little more than a work by a strangely self-conscious, enervated composer who sometimes sounds as if he is parodying himself.
Chen's delicately scaled performance was clean, competent and charmless.
Pub Date: 3/06/99