May 5, 2009: A primary San Francisco opportunity for concerts on a tight budget

The Noontime Concerts™ series at Old St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco, which takes place every Tuesday at 12:30 PM, is not free;  but admission is by a $5 donation, which is still a rather good deal for the music you get.  Furthermore, since the Cathedral is in the heart of Chinatown (at the corner of California and Grant), you can also enjoy some of the most economical meals in the city!  All of the concerts are on a "chamber" scale, since the performing space on the altar is rather limited.  Today's performance by the Russian Chamber Orchestra pretty much pushed the limit with an ensemble of four first violins, four seconds, two violas, two cellos, and one double bass.  (I have heard winds, brass, and percussion at previous performances.)

The music director is Alexander Vereshagin, who left a fully tenured professorship at the St. Petersburg National Conservatory to come to the United States, where he founded this ensemble in 1992.  Cello soloist Lana Gruen studied at the Moscow Conservatory, after which she had a rich career throughout Europe and is now based in the Bay Area.  Presumably, most of the members of the Orchestra have emigrated from Russia.

Gruen was featured in a performance of Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Opus 33, the "Variations on a Rococo Theme."  The theme Tchaikovsky provided has a coda, which tends to be relatively consistently reproduced at the end of each variation, thus forming a unifying thread across the variations.  With the reduced resources of the Orchestra, that coda was performed by a string quartet of the four section leaders, giving it a distinctive transparency, which I had not heard in performances by a larger ensemble.  (I have not been able to check the score to see if Tchaikovsky did not want the entire sections playing this coda.)  The Tchaikovsky was preceded by the first movement of the K. 414 A major piano concerto by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (whom we know was a favorite of Tchaikovsky).  Vereshagin performed the piano solo, conducting from the keyboard.  Again, transparency was the strong suit of the performance, with the voices of the second violins and particularly the violas (Mozart's instrument of choice, as I have previously observed) on equal terms with the first violins.

Having heard the Russian Chamber Orchestra perform several times in the Noontime Concerts™ series, I know that Vereshagin likes to offer an encore and usually tries to lighten the mood with his selection.  In this case his encore was "Jocular Waltz," the fourth movement of Dmitri Shostakovich's Dances of the Dolls suite, originally written for piano in 1952.  So much of Shostakovich's music sits on the razor's edge between the adventurous and the banal, and this little waltz stands as a perfect example.  It begins with an absurdly naïve little theme that begins to derail, first gradually and later with more consistency, only to retreat back to naïveté at the end of the movement.  Still, as so often seems to be the case with Shostakovich, one has to wonder whether or not there is a dark underbelly to the loopy humor that dominates his surface structure.