July 12, 2009: The InterHarmony students have the last word

The InterHarmony International Music Festival at San Francisco State University concluded yesterday afternoon with a concert by an orchestra consisting (almost?) entirely of Festival students, featuring solo performances by three members of the faculty, and conducted by Sidney Harth.  Festival Director Misha Quint performed Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Opus 33 "Variations on a Rococo Theme;"  and this was the only work on the program that required winds in the orchestral accompaniment.  My guess is that the wind players were not Festival students, and some of the lesser wind parts were actually covered by string players.  As usual, Quint was right at home with Tchaikovsky's technical demands and blended well with the orchestra, which still captured the spirit of Tchaikovsky's sonorities even with the substitutions for some of the wind parts.

The other soloists were violinists Jassen Todorov and David Yonan, who played the concerto for two violins in A minor from Antonio Vivaldi's L'estro Armonico, Opus 3, Number 8.  We are used to the familiarity of the "Vivaldi sound;"  but this performance brought out contrapuntal intricacies in lines that weave among each other, not only from the soloists but also from the orchestral accompaniment.  Listening to this interpretation, one could appreciate why the work made such an impression on Johann Sebastian Bach that he prepared is own transcription of it for organ (BWV 593).

The program opened with the G major concerto grosso by George Frideric Handel, the first from his Opus 6 collection of twelve.  Harth conducted this with a good sense of pace, keeping the music moving forward without falling into a steady "sewing machine" tempo but, instead, using subtle decelerations to delimit major phrases.  As with the Vivaldi, there was an effective blend of the ensemble with the solo voices, now coming from within the ensemble.  More problematic, however, was the performance of two works by Jean Sibelius, his C major romance (Opus 42) and the canzonetta written as incidental music for Arvid Järnefelt's play Kuolema.  These are both short works, but they involve complex harmonies with sophisticated voice-leading demands and ambiguous rhythmic patterns.  I suspect that the students were not yet up to the task of seriously listening to music at this level, although they were perfectly at home with the more straightforward harmonic language of Sibelius' "Andante Festivo."

The afternoon concluded with several encore pieces, listed in the program as "Just for fun."  These included a string orchestra arrangement of that ever-popular final caprice of Niccolò Paganini's 24 Caprices, transcriptions of two short pieces by Georges Bizet, and (not listed on the program) "Bess, You Is My Woman," from George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess in an arrangement probably based on the one Jascha Heifetz used for his solo encores.  Harth introduced the Gershwin with a remark about a meeting of minds between old-timers and today's youth.  It made me realize that those of us more attuned to Steve Riffkin's string quartet arrangement of Jimi Hendrix' "Purple Haze" are now "old-timers;"  but Harth did not strike me as the sort of conductor willing to cut loose with that once-popular Kronos Quartet encore!