Wandering towards musical truths
Last Thursday, Feb 1, the Berkeley Symphony was led by guest conductor Keitaro Harada in a concert of French themes and composers. Beginning with the luminous visions of Fauré and ending with the stormy emotions of Berlioz, this was a concert of potent themes, but it wasn’t entirely successful.
After their regular conductor Joana Carneiro announced that she was pregnant again and could not travel to Berkeley from her home in Lisbon, the orchestra has had a series of guest conductors. The demands of an orchestra and the fulfillment of home life should be a rewarding balancing act, and one hopes they will see their way through this.
And so the orchestra has had a half-dozen conductors fill in over the last couple years, reminiscent of the two-year search that resulted in Carneiro becoming their conductor. Some of those stand-ins were absolutely top-drawer, and Harada is definitely in that list, but even so, it takes years to adjust to a new conductor’s nuances.
An alto in the chorus told me that Harada had “clarity and generosity,” and was a pleasure to work with. Watching from the audience, I could see his flair and precise gestures. They opened with Faure’s Cantique de Jean Racine, a work of water-color harmonies and feathery entrances. The Symphony was gorgeous here, and enlarged by a professional caliber “pick-up” chorus specially created for this concert. Prepared by Eric Choate, this was like a fantasy football team, with members well-known in the Bay Area: sumptuous basses, soulful baritones, punchy altos and sopranos that were dead on pitch instead of a hair under!
What this group was really hired for was Gordon Getty’s Joan and the Bells, a three-movement oratorio based on the death of Joan of Arc. That work was surprisingly complex for this composer better known for modernist intimate works, with themes built of punishing leaps and high descending intervals and lots of dark brass undertows.
Two soloists sang the text. Soprano Lisa Delan had warm lower notes and inhabited the role of Joan to the hilt, but her top notes were too constricted to be persuasive. She sang at the premiere in 1998, and has recorded definitive recordings of this. Opposite her, Lester Lynch sang the bass-baritone part of the cleric who condemns her to burn at the stake. His voice was so warm and richly inflected that anything he said sounded reasonable… almost including his judgment to burn the 19-year-old warrior!
The orchestra was on-point here with powerful entrances and delicious brass, but the scoring kept them in careful balance with the soloists and chorus, and that varying density of weave allowed for some lovely textures, with piccolo and harp shining through like stars in a sky darkened into night with contrabassoon and tuba.
They finished the evening with Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique, an auto-biographical work that displayed his passionate artistic life with a prodigious sense of orchestral color. From dreamy lyricism to madness, and from the march to the scaffold to the opening of the gates of Hell, this was a very French take on spurned love and murder-suicide, and culminated in one of the Great Moments in symphonic writing, the hair-raising Dies Irae of Judgment Day.
Berlioz’ own life reads in part like a soap opera, reflecting a passionate soul and the turbulence of his time, and the programmatic “fantastique” is, in the words of Leonard Bernstein, “an opium dream.”
Here again the Berkeley Symphony brass were phenomenal, with Scott Choate on tuba and Thomas Hornig, Craig Bryant and Kurt Patzner on trombone leading their comrades into solid cohesion.
—Adam Broner