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University Centre Auditorium
February 9, 2020
"Ladies and gentlemen, because I working in this town for 25 years, I like to make some kind of appreciation to very important factor what make me successful to lots of my colleagues in this town. I'd like to thank Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, Beethoven, Mozart, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov. Thank you."
Dmitri Tiomkin's acceptance speech at the 1955 Oscars (which I have quoted in its entirety) raised a number of hackles — mostly of his fellow film composers. One name that he signally failed to mention was that of Bedřich Smetana, possibly because he, like many of us, was uncertain as to exactly how to pronounce "Bedřich".
And yet, as Sunday's performance by the 119 musicians of the combined Greater Victoria Youth Orchestra, Sooke Philharmonic Orchestra and Victoria Chamber Orchestra made abundantly clear, Smetana was a composer with a distinctly pictorial sensiblity, who could undoubtedly made a fortune in Hollywood, had he not been born almost a century too soon.
I imagine that most of, if not the entire, audience was expecting something rather special from this conflation of the three orchestras; I know I was. Nor were we in any way disappointed. While each group separately is a force to be reckoned with in the musical life of our fortunate part of the world, combined they provided a vast range of dynamics and tone colours.
It is, for example, uncommon, to say the least, to hear two harps on any stage in Victoria; McKenna Jennings and Sheryn Basham were excellent at the very opening of the first poem in the cycle, Vyšehrad. Sagely, Yariv Aloni did not conduct their opening duet, except to set the tempo. The winds and brass took over smoothly before the strings (according to the programme, no fewer than seventy six of them) joined in to provide a rich, weighty sound seldom heard in this town. Aloni managed the tempo changes well and the full orchestra provided a sumpotuous, powerful sound with no hint of harshness. I must say, though, that I remain less-than-totally-convinced by Smetana's user of the percussion in this movement: a little triangle goes a very long way and surely the second pair of cymbals was arguably redundant; and as for the third pair...
Vltava (also known as Die Moldau) is easily the best-known of the six movements — Má Vlast (My Homeland) was not originally conceived as a cycle — and the one most frequently performed. The exact source for the main melody is not known for sure: it allegedly stems initially from the sixteenth century Italian song La Mantovana, although it may well be that Smetana first encountered it during his years in Gothenburg (1856-61) in Sweden, where the song "Ack Värmeland du sköna" (also known as Värmlandssången or Värmlandsvisan) was well-known.
Here we can hear Smetana's pictorial abilities at their very best: has anything ever sounded more like the source of a mighty river than the flute duet, soon oined by clarinets, which opens the movement? The tempo shift into the dance which, according to the composer's own descrfiption, celebrates a farmer's wedding, was most adroitly managed and there was more exquisite flutes and ethereal strings for the "mermaids in the moonlight" section.
Šárka, based upon a bloodthirsty legend ("The Maidens' War"), opened in suitably dramatic fashion and built to an exuberant close, where the eponymous heroine and her companions fall upon and murder a troup of sleeping knights.
The second half of the concert opened with what is probably the second-best-known of the six individual tone poems: Z českých luhů a hájů ("From Bohemia's woods and fields"). Once again the smooth power of the opening was most impressive; I also very mich enjoyed the fugato which passed downwards through the strings (first violins to seconds, to violas, to cellos, to basses), although as one of my companions said afterwards, it was entertaining the first time or two, but perhaps less so when repeated yet again. (I have always felt that describing the indiviual parts of Ma Vlast as symphonic poems is somewhat misleading, as there is very little evidence of symphonic development: rather, let us call them tone poems.)
Tábor is a city in Southern Bohemia, prominent during the Hussite Wars in the early fifteenth century. Which helps explain the ominous opening and the generally sombre tone of the introduction. Once again, the movement features numerous tempo changes, all extremely well managed.
The final movement, Blaník opens with a continuation of the motto theme from Tábor as the music pictures the awakening of the army of knights led by St. Wenceslas sleeping inside the mountain to save the country in its "gravest hour".
The massive crescendo and blazing final bars capped an afternoon of wonderful music making from Aloni and his three ensembles.
Throughout the concert all sections of the combined orchestra gave of their very best. I gather that the absence of risers for the brass and winds (there simply was not room) meant that ensemble was harder to achieve than it would otherwise have been. I also suspect that few, if any, of the audience would have suspected anything and there were numerous occasions when I was singularly impressed by their precision.
I am still not entirely certain precisely what it was that the concert was celebrating — the musicians' good fortune in being able to make music together in the finest place on Earth, perhaps — and I imagine that logistics would mitigate against making this an annual event, but perhaps once every two or three years would be feasible?
One can only hope so.
In the meantime, this was a more than memorable occasion.
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