A NEW SONG CYCLE, A DOWN-UNDER ORCHESTRA
                                    And Dawn Upshaw, a Stellar American Soprano
                                              By D. Rane Danubian
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of June 16-23,  2011
                                                                  Vol. 13, No. 108
            BERKELEY---The “Ojai North” experiment makes eminent sense: Bringing the brief,  bold and bracing Ojai (CA) Festival to Northern California for a week of concerts in music otherwise simply left down south.
            The stellar element in the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s odd program of transcriptions June 14 was the ageless lyric soprano Dawn Upshaw, who animated the wispy, atmospheric, countryside poems newly composed by Maria Schneider, “Winter Morning Walks.” The nine poems running a half hour vacillate between mellow jazz, romantic moods, chanteuse digressions and total animation. Schneider runs from the agitation of swarming bats in a barn to the consummate tranquility of “the silent dominion of starlight,” accompanied by no more than a string ensemble, plus an occasional add-on instrument for contrast. Especially effective are the pendulum swings of the music to convey the wild swings of the bird feeder in the wind.
            Schneider, who took bows, is a versatile mid-career artist on the cutting edge, as likely to turn up conducting a hot jazz ensemble as to write classics. And Upshaw was her inspired protagonist, though I’d have been more impressed yet had amplification not been used for the soloist.
            Upshaw’s true tour de force came subsequently when she threw out both microphone and score to sing five demanding Bartok folk songs in the original Hungarian, by memory---a feat I have never heard done before by a non-Hungarian. Even though the consonants and accents were a mite subdued, the pronunciation was laudable, and the content came through even more intelligibly than in the Schneider (English) selections. With the spirited “Six-Forint Song” at the end, Upshaw very nearly had ‘em dancing folk dances from Transylvanian villages in the Zellerbach  Hall aisles. Were Bartok still alive, he’d have fainted dead away with surprise and delight, particularly since Hungarian is conceded to be one of the most difficult languages anywhere.
            The Australian Chamber Orchestra was baffling, leaving  one with mixed feelings—outstanding players, but a hodge-podge of arrangements for the program. Artistic Director/violinist  Richard Tognetti served up a scrambled checkerboard drawn from Crumb and Webern sources, played his own orchestral arrangement of the Bartok songs, and  finished with an overly-rich reworking of Grieg’s early G Minor string quartet. It was as though nobody ever wrote music for chamber orchestras.
            Two encores rewarded the modest crowd of enthusiasts on June 14: Piazzolla’s  'Oblivion,' and the traditional Finnish folk tune 'Antin Mikko.'
            (Ed. Note: Apologies for the delayed posting of this review caused by problems of the ISP.)
            Australian Chamber Orchestra in concert, with Dawn Upshaw soprano, June 14 at Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, under Cal Performances auspices. For info: 510-642-9988, or go online.

        ©D. Rane Danubian 2011
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        D. Rane Danubian 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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