Critical Acclaim for our 2000-2001 Season
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Red Priest For people who "appreciate" classical music but have a little secret -- it bores them -- the answer is Red Priest. The four flamboyantly dressed British musicians mug, throw funny lines at us and make us laugh. But something important is going on, and it happens fast. By the time they ripped into the music Saturday night at Dumbarton Concerts in Georgetown, the audience had learned something central about it -- how, say, a two-bar canon is laid over a six-bar ground. The process was effortless, a barrel of fun and almost invisibly subtle. Underneath it all, Red Priest -- Piers Adams (recorder), Julia Bishop (violin), Angela East (cello), Howard Beach (harpsichord) -- comes to play. Adams, their Pan-like leading comedian, is an astonishing recorder virtuoso who unleashes volleys of notes with piercing articulation and firearm precision. Bishop partners with comparable authority, and the ensemble presses fast tempos to frenetic extremes that would be ridiculously hell-for-leather if the music were not so immaculately forged and cunningly phrased. Sometimes -- as in Telemann's "Gypsy" Sonata in A Minor -- Red Priest uses "rhetorical style" to expand or compress tempos bar by bar, an outrageous trick that pulls the music around like taffy and threatens chaos at every turn. But gyroscopic rhythmic integrity averted disaster and made the outcome legitimately baroque and thoroughly musical. An electrified audience shouted and cheered.
Stunning Shostakovich From the St. Petersburg Quartet An impassioned performance of Shostakovich's Quartet No. 9 by the St. Petersburg String Quartet at Dumbarton Church on Saturday confirmed the group's heady reputation as premier interpreters of this 20th-century giant. The vein of personal anguish running through Shostakovich's quartets can easily be made to sound strident, alienating or simply depressive. The St. Petersburg brought unassailable technique and intonation to this music and, more important, got the emotional temperature right. The score played like an intense conversation, but emotions never got out of hand, thanks to an astonishingly calibrated range of voicings and dynamics. In an ensemble forged of four equal, distinctive soloists, first violinist Alla Aranovskaya's tone--dark and deep and lustrous--was especially moving in the first movement's mournful outpourings. They made Glazunov's charming Novelettes Nos. 1 to 3 sound more substantive than they are. Cellist Leonid Shukaev's rapid-fire, feather-light pizzicati were a delight in the Middle Easternisms of No. 3. Borodin's Quartet No. 2 must be the best piece of chamber music ever written by an amateur--or at least part-time--composer, chock-full of terrific, tirelessly repeated melodies. The Russians delivered it with sinew, luscious tonal blend and phrasing that surged with ardor. An encore of Shostakovich's "Age of Gold" Polka was turned with breathtaking assurance and laugh-out-loud wit. Now let's hear this fabulous foursome tackle some Beethoven. |