Review of Newport Symphony concert featuring Rachel Barton Pine

Guest review by Joshua Lickteig

NEWPORT, Ore. — As crisp as the cool sunny sea of January’s 17th day this year in Newport, the only year-round symphony of Oregon’s coast played a program of works spanning the 20th century, in a chronology that progressed from impressionism to post-minimalism and looped back to the late Romantic. Unifying the thread, each work has clear roots in dance, even if at times more about the idea of dancing than act itself.

Falla’s folk-musical remnants of pre-urban life, Stravinsky’s sometimes wry polystylistic assemblage of former worlds from scraps of evidence, Adams’ meta-foxtrot depicting Mao and Madame Mao perhaps in a ballroom during the Cultural Revolution, and the brief motivic interlacings and lilts and waltz-like qualities of lyrical sections of Glazunov.

The night began with a light though pensive mood altogether as music director and conductor Adam Flatt addressed the audients of the 371-seat (Alice Silverman) proscenium theatre, nearly seven-eighths full. In his preconcert talk, Flatt (also director of Tuscaloosa Symphony Orchestra and Colorado Ballet), considered the early 1900s as discourse amongst composers, exploring the personal worlds, styles of life, and artistic methods of the era’s and its preceding ‘große Persönlichkeiten’, or big personalities. Onstage, the emerald-green chairs and purple-lit glow from behind white acoustic panels was giving ethereally to the room.

Rachel Barton Pine – acclaimed violinist known for dazzling performance across repertoires, who debuted with the Chicago Symphony at age 10 and became the first American and youngest gold medal winner of the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition – joined the discussion with her instrument, a 1742 Guarneri del Gesù violin, which she jested one day would be called the ‘ex-Pine’ (it has illustrious history with virtuosos like Antonio Bazzini and Brahms’s protégé Marie Soldat and passed through the Wittgenstein family). She talked amiably with the concertgoers and noted, “I love variety. My favorite piece is whatever I’m playing that night.” About Concerto for Violin in A Minor, Op. 82 by Alexander Glazunov (b. 1865), the featured soloist shared, “It is a wild romp of lots of colorful instruments . . . Incredible lyrical writing.” Pine first learned the work at the age of fifteen and has recorded its performance with the Russian National Orchestra. She spoke about the overall flow of the piece, its micro-details of phrasing and the violin’s imitation of other instruments; also of a secondary theme that weaves through the opening and middle sections, while loose hints of cadenza seek their culmination in the finale’s accelerated and exhilarating conclusion. On the notorious finger-twisting solo passage, Pine mentioned it requires about as much practice as the rest of the concerto itself, and added, “There is no coincidence [the notes] are all in that rich dark [lowest] G-string.”

After the talk, Executive Director Dan Howard reminded the crowd of a baroque event, “Music On the Bayfront”, on Valentine’s Day (a Saturday), at Pacific Maritime Heritage Center, which will showcase harpsichord and period instruments, and the upcoming annual Gala March 28th. From the string section, in a get-to-know-the-orchestra moment, he introduced violinist Alistair Kok, who expressed appreciation for the arts community’s support and the fulfilling experience of working professionally with local and regional musicians.

Spanish Dance No. 1 from La vida Breve, which Flatt earlier called a ‘bonbon’, whirs by, and its derivations of fiery flamenco and ‘zapateado’ (footwork) with the castanets give a glimpse of (b. 1876) Manuel de Falla’s creative philosophy and patriotic aesthetic; he is known to have urged colleagues to reject the notion of ‘universal’ musical formulae (i.e. the ethos of pre-existing German canon).

Next, the orchestra exhibits Pulcinella: what Flatt voiced critics would call “a new postwar objectivism— dispensing with romantic notions of expressing the heart.” It was performed last by the NSO in mid-November 2008. Igor Stravinsky (b.1882) presents the matter of old music, not the manner — “almost a taxidermied animal ”—  through discontinuity, irregularities, and sometimes angularities. Commissioned by impresario Sergei Diaghilev as a ballet (with Picasso designing costumes and sets), the 1920 work reimagines 18th-century music through a distinctly modern lens. To better suit for concert performance, Stravinsky revised it in 1947. Throughout the suite (I-VII) the orchestra embraced its moments of hilarity: rude sounds and clownishness punctuate sprightly string bass solos across many short movements. They unfolded the finale like an actual memory in the glimmer of winter frost, perhaps reaching back to folksongs and dances from Stravinsky’s childhood near the Polish-Ukrainian border. Utterances could be heard in the crowd lamenting the extant era’s continued power of myth.

Beyond intermission, the symphony brings a focused and scientific precision to The Chairman Dances, from the cutting-room floor of one of our most prominent living composers, John Adams’ (b. 1947) opera Nixon in China. The 13-minute concert piece differs in orchestration from the operatic setup. The entire work, as Flatt put it, belongs to the “so-called CNN operas”—works depicting modern historical events. This foxtrot is a surreal fantasy sequence from a presidential banquet, where Madame Mao hangs paper lanterns, changes into a tight cheongsam slit up the hip, and signals the orchestra to play before dancing alone. As Mao descends from his portrait to join her, days past are brought to their minds, and music plays on a gramophone. The NSO brilliantly conjured the wind-up and gradual slowdown of the contraption: the perceived music skips as the stylus gets stuck, and in the suspension of coherent sound, the sizzle with cymbal shimmers, pedal bass drum, and hi-hat snare are mechanical in quality yet awake. The whole percussion batterie—including triangle, glockenspiel, xylophone, vibraphone, crotales, bell tree, castanets, sandblocks, woodblocks, and timpani—functioned with excellence. An almost-hidden 9-foot Steinway Grand D tucked behind the harp anchored textures.

In Glazunov’s dramatic (and unpausing) concerto of wreathed themes the orchestra and soloist exchanged ideas smoothly and affectionately. Pine’s playing was spellbinding. For an encore, she offered Maud Powell’s 1919 violin transcription of the spiritual Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen, originally arranged by J. Rosamond Johnson. The pioneering American violinist Powell created this adaptation to support Johnson’s New York Music School Settlement for Colored People, featuring it in her final performances. Pine’s revival of this work honors Powell’s legacy.

Musicians met with listeners after the performance in the lobby, where refreshments & sandwiches were served, and Pine greeted and spoke with many. The 37th season continues its standard programming with “Listening for Shakespeare” March 21st-22nd.

Joshua D. Lickteig is an artist and engineer born near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His latest books are Half Moon Day Sun (2021) and Ten Control Mills (2015), some poems from which appeared in Don Russell’s plays Dreams of Drowning (2022) and iTopia (2016). He lives in Portland, Oregon, and is an ongoing contributor to the Concordia News.