January 12, 2009

REVIEW: Happy Birthday ProMusica!

ProMusica musicians sink teeth into revived works
Saturday, January 10, 2009 10:02 PM
By JENNIFER HAMBRICK
FOR THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Concerts happen in Columbus all the time, so it takes something extra to turn a concert into a true event.

Tonight's performance of the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra was a multimedia event celebrating music by Mozart, Peter Schickele and Beethoven -- and the orchestra's 30th anniversary -- in glorious sounds and images.

One of the "games" at this birthday party was viewing screenings of videotaped birthday greetings from Columbus community leaders and ProMusica administrators and musicians -- and their dogs (more below) - on a large screen at the back of the Southern Theatre's stage. But the real treat were the orchestra and guest piano soloist, Yuja Wang.

From its first bow strokes, the orchestra played the first movement of Mozart's Symphony No. 31 "Paris" with crystalline precision, leaving no residue of romantic excess.

ProMusica Founder and Music Director Timothy Russell kept the second movement, Andante, blissfully light. Better tuning in the winds and brass and a stronger presence in the principal flute would have brought the winds up to par with the strings.

Russell's tempo in the allegro finale was perfect. Though the winds were a little off kilter during the fugato section, everyone reached the finish line together as Mozart's minuscule finale bubbled to its conclusion.

The program's centerpiece was a reprise (14 years after Russell and ProMusica performed the world premiere in 1994) of T hurber's Dogs by Peter Schickele (alias: P.D.Q. Bach), a tribute to the Columbus-born humorist whose drawings of dogs bespoke his love for all pugs, poodles, huskies and hounds. Projected video animations of Thurber's drawings produced by Ohio State University's Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design in collaboration with Thurber House enhanced the performance.

The animations were a perfect backdrop for Schickele's score, which much of the time has the air of cartoon music, and captured all the sweetness, humor and joy of Thurber's candid canids: a mother hound cooking pancakes for a line of hungry hound pups, a drunken hound (from bar hopping with its master) navigating undulating landscapes and a haphazard game of pool, the dreamscape of a hound asleep.

The orchestra's ensemble was best in the third movement, He Goes With His Owner Into Bars. But it sank its teeth into the more emotionally satisfying fifth movement, Dog At His Master's Grave.

Champagne at intermission led Russell to conduct orchestra and audience in Happy Birthday before returning to the stage with pianist and Gilmore artist Wang for Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto. None of the pathos of Beethoven's Sturm und Drang-ish concerto was lost on Wang, who flowed without affectation across a deep emotional range and broad color palette. The solo piano opening of the second movement, Largo, was hymnlike in its understatement. In the rest of the movement, the orchestra's strings in particular might have matched more consistently the warmth of Wang's sound.

Wang's evenhanded and controlled approach to the third movement, rondo-allegro, didn't sap the spirit from Beethoven's peasant dance finale. Instead, it allowed the pianist's clean technique and intelligent interpretation to shine forth. Wang may well come someday to occupy a place among the world's great Beethoven interpreters.