CHAMBER ORCHESTRAS VENTURING FAR AFIELD 
                                              By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of Oct. 6-13, 2008
                                                                  Vol. 11, No. 19
          A woman conductor brought a Canadian orchestra from Manitoba to play Armenian and European music.
            Just another typical day on the San Francisco arts scene.
            The focal attraction was the Metropolitan Opera lyric soprano from Canada, Isabel Bayrakdarian, interpreting songs from her ethnic homeland written by the priest Gomidas Vartabed (1869-1935), one of the leading lights of his musical constituency. The program given at the Herbst Theatre Oct. 4, was a veritable smorgasbord of varied pieces---eight selections, and Ms. Bayrakdarian doing 10 songs in all.
            Gomidas’ song texts have a folksy touch, with references to the garden, to children, to the apricot tree, to the sky, to the birds. His romantic music, with melismatic, repetitive patterns familiar in Armenia,  ranges from highly spirited love songs like “Oh, Nazan” to the touching and heartfelt “Lament,” where the chamber orchestra is supplemented by piano and the duduk, an end-blown flute with haunting wavering tones, a bit like the renaissance recorder.
            The soloist rendered these with clarity of voice and feeling in the original Armenian, which the presenters at S.F. Performances had gotten painstakingly transliterated and also translated into English.  
            The most distinctive in all this was a set of Gomidas’ dances for solo piano, with quirky, idiosyncratic rhythms that called for nimble footwork (left to one’s imagination), played by the soprano’s pianistic husband Serouj Kradjian, who had also put together much of the evening’s program.
            The whole slate had been inspired by the International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights, paying homage to victims of persecution, most of them in the 20th century. This comprised some Hungarian (Bartok), Greek (Skalkottas), Moravia (Klein/Saudek’s memorable “Partita for Strings”), and a pair of  “Hebraic Melodies” by Ravel.
            The Manitoba Chamber Orchestra under Anne Manson was a youthful ensemble  of 19, a mite grainy here and there, but reasonably effective nonetheless, led by Concertmaster Karl Stobbe, who contributed a lovely obbligato to the Gomidas song “The Crane."
            MEANWHILE, ACROSS THE BAY--- Very few community orchestras essay world premieres. Undaunted, the Castro Valley (CA) Adult School Chamber Orchestra performed Jack Curtis Dubowsky’s half-hour-long “Eisenhower Farewell Address,”  setting to music and narration that president’s earnest-but-not-lyrical swan song delivered in 1961, with surprising parallels to today, decrying the “military-industrial complex,” and lamenting the elusiveness of peace as well as the hefty spending required by both. It was just as though President Eisenhower had a crystal ball to peer a half-century into the future.
            All such musico-political efforts will inevitably be measured against the benchmark of Copland’s “A Lincoln Portrait,” in which the latter had manipulated the presidential texts to provide effective refrains (which Dubowsky, a 43-year-old San Franciscan, did not). Furthermore the new work collapsed into fragments, like an orange, without a true narration-to-music binding agent. Dubowsky however built a neat opening brass chorale on the president’s initial (D.D.E.), and later portrayed forcefully the busy machinery of military technology that Eisenhower had warned against.
            The piece narrated on Oct. 5 by Scott Budman and led by Joshua Cohen should get another  hearing, and more evaluation in depth, performed by some more experienced ensemble than this fearless, but not flawless, adult-school community orchestra.
            Manitoba Chamber Orchestra in a predominantly Armenian program.  S.F. Performances attraction. For info on SFP: (415) 392-2545, or go online.  
            Castro Valley Adult School Chamber Orchestra, Castro Valley  (CA) Center for the Arts Oct. 5. For info: go online.

        ©Paul Hertelendy 2008
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           Paul Hertelendy has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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