A Hope-ful Jam Session
Is violinist Daniel Hope a reincarnation of the great California-born (but English) Yehudi Menuhin?
He is headed down that very path in his versatility while hopping across the Atlantic, but this time in a westerly direction. Now he is whipping up Americana music like a local, then pairing with the amazing jazz of the Marcus Roberts Trio in idiomatic outpourings that are driving audiences wild.
His Friday (May 10) audience in fact was so demanding of encores that, in order not to play into the wee hours, by the next night he shortened the program, then was cajoled into an added encore with the jazz trio by the sellout crowd.
Visualize the dramatic transformation: sedate regular subscribers to Hope’s New Century Chamber Orchestra suddenly enkindled into a stand-up, clap-it-up jazz-club crowd when the trio, the NCCO and Hope got swinging together. And orchestral musicians on stage—usually a model of decorous restraint—began smiling, shifting about and tapping toes. Credit the irresistible catalytic force of the Roberts-Hope linkup.
The main program went smoothly enough; only purists would sneer at arrangements (by Paul Bateman) used for songs by Copland and Bernstein, with voices removed. Hope and his ensemble caught the nuances of “West Side Story” idiomatically, even where a touch of Piazzolla seemed called for. The group played as one, totally integrated, projecting the eclectic influences of Bernstein’s one great hit show.
But that was a mere prelude to the yes, jam session of Gershwin favorites, entitled “Song Suite” (in the Bateman mode), with amplification added. The sequence of jazz variations rotating through the trio was tossed back and forth with Hope and a score of NCCO all-string players, from Hope at his soulful best in “The Man I Love” on to the pulse-quickening pair “Fascinating Rhythm” and “I Got Rhythm,” among others.
The improvisations here by pianists Roberts and his bass player Rodney Jordan were colorful and imaginative.
To pacify the dazzling crowd, by now totally converted to this exotic new faith—-chamber-cum-jazz—the encore was Cole Porter’s “It’s Alright with Me,” from the 1953 musical “Can-Can,” one of Porter’s very last great hits.
This program merits recording. For starters, this repertory is already scheduled lock, stock and Bernstein to go on the NCCO’s 1st-ever European tour, mostly to Germany. Clearly in ending his first year as music director here, Hope, the ultra-polished, multiple-idiom fiddler/concert soloist, has left his audiences hoping for yet more over future seasons. In the manner of orchestras two centuries ago, the NCCO uses no podium and no conductor, simply with Hope leading from that violin of almost infinite versatility. The program also entailed the Barber “Adagio for Strings,” a very haunting piece that many people tell me was the saddest piece ever written, even more so than funeral marches by Chopin, Beethoven, Mahler and others. Maybe.
MUSIC NOTES—The drummer in the Roberts Trio is a Marsalis, first name Jason, the youngest of the renowned Marsalis musical brothers.
New Century Chamber Orchestra of San Francisco, Daniel Hope violinist/music director, in season-ending concert collaboration with the Marcus Roberts jazz Trio; May 11 at the S.F. Conservatory of Music. For NCCO info: go online.
