The Signature Symphony at Tulsa Community College sought to supply a little hometown pride with each of the work its presented as part of its Williams Signature Classics concert Saturday evening at the Van Trease Performing Art Center for Education.
Two of the pieces featured members of the orchestra as soloists, while the third piece had as its foundation one of the most popular songs ever to be penned by an Oklahoman: “This Land is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie.
The most successful of the three was the blending of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” with Astor Piazzolla’s “Four Seasons of Buenos Aires,” which featured the orchestra’s concertmaster, Maureen O’Boyle, as the soloist.
Interspersing the individual concerti of Vivaldi’s best-known work with Piazzolla’s tango driven pieces was the brain-child of violinist and conductor Gidon Kremer. The idea was to create a kind of time-traveling conversation between two very distinct musical styles.
Vivaldi’s “Seasons” – or, at least, sections of them – have been subjected to all sorts of abuse at the hands of the advertising industry that their beauty, charm and – yes – inventiveness is overlooked. Conversely, the tango was for many years considered one of the lower forms of music – dance hall tunes of the sleaziest kind.
Piazzolla’s work revealed the tango to be a form of immense beauty, expressiveness and artistry. He composed tangos that were meant to listen to closely, rather than to serve simply as something to which people can dance. And Kremer, by weaving these two works together, showed that these two composers equally deserved the designation as great.
Kremer also created what is an epic concert piece, running close to 90 minutes in length. But that time seemed to fly by Saturday night – the way the seasons seem to do when one is enjoying one’s life.
O’Boyle’s playing was sharp and energetic throughout, though she seemed to attack the Piazzolla pieces with a touch more fire and panache, recreating the slinky tone of the bandoneon, the accordion-like instrument that is a foundation of tango music, or striking off some deliberately ugly sounds to open Piazzolla’s “Autumn.” And she shifted easily from the slash of the tango to the precision of the Baroque and back again.
She was well supported by the Signature Symphony strings. Harpischordist Dana Mahar and principal bass Robin Smith set alternated in establishing the rhythmic underpinning of each movement, while principal cello Monte Lawson got the chance to soar a little with a wonderfully played solo during the Piazzolla “Autumn.”
Composer David Amram was a friend of Woody Guthrie during Guthrie’s final years in New York City, and Guthrie’s survivors commissioned him to write Symphonic Variations on a Theme by Woody Guthrie. It’s an interesting piece of music, more for its ambitions than anything else. As conductor Barry Epperley said several times during his introduction to this piece, “David is from New York City” – implying that Amram likely had no first-hand experience with the sounds west of the Hudson River prior to writing this work, which premiered last year.
Which might explain why Amram would think that an Argentinean tango would do to evoke Mexico, or that Irish jigs were just the thing played at a barn dance in Texas, or that an American Indian stomp dance would use music that sounded a bit like something by a late 20th century minimalist.
The orchestra at times seemed to mirror that confusion – the final section, a series of New York City vignettes, never quite came together, as if each section of the orchestra was doing its own thing, and it was only coincidental that they happened to be in sync with the musicians around them.
The best part of the piece was the way it allowed some rarely featured players to have a moment in the spotlight, such as English hornist Ingrid Lobaugh, Bret Nichols on tuba and principal clarinetist Christy Andrews.
The evening opened with J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concert No. 2, with violinist Eric Samuelson, flutist Dana Higbee, oboist Julie Combs and trumpeter Stephen Goforth as the soloist ensemble.
Samuelson, Higbee and Combs were quite good in the central movement, as they wove their melodic lines together over a cello and harpsichord figure. The outer movements showcased Goforth, who battled to an uneasy draw the flurry of rapid high notes that that made up the bulk of the music he played.
