Nigel Armstrong

A Musical Mountain
A Prodigy
By Robert Commanday

Never think that the Berkeley Symphony shrinks from a challenge, not while Kent Nagano is in charge. But this time, last Wednesday, its largest mountain of the year was turned over to the orchestra’s associate conductor, George Thomson, and a good thing too. Thomson and the Symphony gave Charles Wuorinen’s Symphony Seven a good ride, and it came off as well as the work itself would allow. It's dense, original, much of it highly compressed, and long.

Balancing it was a discovery and joy, a 14-year-old prodigy, Nigel Armstrong, playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. It was a clear, finely fashioned performance of the sort that leaves the audience in wonderment: “Do you think he will . . . ?” That was followed by Carlos Chávez’ best-known work, the lively, rich Sinfonia India (Symphony No. 2) that was supposedly matched at the program’s top by Heitor Villa Lobos’ Bachianas brasileiras No. 9 for string orchestra. That was a mistake.

Wuorinen’s Symphony Seven overwhelms in two ways, one positive, one not. Launched with a single note, D, at maximum volume, it bolts into micro-activity, a dazzle of thematic material distributed around as many instruments as there are notes. Listening into it intently, you are caught up in this pointillism of jagged lines made of single notes in different colors, light and fast, Scherzando. Successions of notes created in pyramids, one brass instrument at a time, pile up chords in the manner of melodies. There’s no end of play of texture, color, harmonies, all in highly charged rhythmic design. Then music of long, dense chords moving slowly takes over, and this, the program notes tell us, is the second movement, thereafter interleaved with the first. The Scherzando returns, then the second movement again, the two “movements” alternating, interacting - thesis, antithesis, and finally reaching synthesis, a kind of reconciliation between the two.

Super-concentration of ideas

Although Wuorinen would doubtless defend to the death the musical necessities of this extended interaction, it goes on too long. I think what happens is that when the chain of good but disparate musical ideas introduced at a fast pace passes a certain concentration, they aren’t perceived as individual identities. After continuous close focusing, fatigue sets in for the listeners, and possibly for the players. The larger musical idea then becomes really the general style that generates the wide-leaping, angular designs, or simply the textures that this activity creates. By itself, that’s fine; but the proportions don’t work, and the movements together don’t achieve the unswerving momentum that’s wanted.

The final movement concentrates on variations on a chromatic cell, building to a powerful climactic chord crush that gradually pulls away to D major, and then to a simple D-F# interval. The concept of the whole is highly original and the composition brilliant, as was Thomson’s realization of the prodigious, intricate detail and large span. His clear, particular and musical conducting and evident mastery of the score brought the players into it. It would be interesting to know how the co-commissioning Toledo Symphony’s debut with it came out, and how the Milwaukee Symphony’s performance will fare.

With the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, Armstrong was as calm and poised as a veteran, undemonstrative in playing the music not himself, emphasizing the lyric grace of the piece. keeping all in balance, he and Thomson in complete rapport. His manner was surprisingly serene, his tone clear, true, sweet if contained, accuracy exemplary, expressiveness sympathetic with no trace of emotional indulging. No doubt, soon enough his phrasing will open up, breathe more, become more shapely. The exuberant audience response was answered by an encore that showed off a splendid, fearless technique even more daringly and keenly than the Mendelssohn last movement: Sarasate’s Zapateado (in Thomson’s orchestration).

All he needs to be going on with

To speculate about Armstrong’s future, as audiences love to do, is presumptuous in print. There is a world of opportunity in front of him; also a world filled with experiences, knocks, hurdles, and imponderables. Armstrong has all the makings, including musicality. Making this concerto debut at 14 puts him on pace with the major young artists who are now five to twenty years older than he. His gifts now are comparable to theirs then. He will be fascinating to watch.

The Sinfonia India that Chávez introduced here when he was music director of Cabrillo Festival (1970-1974) is a joyous assimilation and symphonization of Mexican musical traditions. It draws on Indian melodies, investing and imbedding them in zesty rhythms involving changing meters, high syncopation and an outsized and exotic percussion section. The dissonance is high and pungent, the dance energy charged. Thomson and the orchestra got it on the nose. It demonstrates the parallel of Chávez and Copland. As one was to the United States, the other was to Mexico.

Villa-Lobos, by contrast, took a much more conservative, academic approach to his Bachianas brasileiras No. 9, the novelty of which has long since worn off. Evidently receiving the short end of the orchestra’s rehearsal time, with its often-divided string sections it didn’t fare well. It was readily put out of mind in the excitement of the greater part of the program that followed.

(Robert P. Commanday, senior editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)

© 2005 Robert Commanday, all rights reserved

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