Performance lacks passion

An evening of music by Maurice Ravel and Hector Berlioz should be full of spectacular colors and daring playing. This was the case only about half the time in Sunday night's Symphony Orchestra concert, conducted by Christopher Larkin, a British-trained brass player and conductor. \nThe Ravel work was the "Concerto for the Left Hand in D Major" and the soloist was the Canadian Jimmy Briere, currently a student of Menahem Pressler. Ravel wrote the work in 1930 for Paul Wittgenstein (Ludwig's brother, for all you philosophy majors out there), who had lost his right arm fighting in World War I. The concerto can be seen as Ravel's response to the war's horrors, filled as it is with wry martial fanfares in the brass and beginning with a somber and brooding introduction. \nBriere ably handled the challenges of the work, easily bringing out the theme from the rippling accompaniment in the final cadenza. Would that Larkin was an equally able accompanist: the orchestra was often out of sync with Briere and did not bring his passion to their parts. \nBerlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, written in 1830, ended the concert. The five-movement symphony is a programmatic depiction of a love affair gone horribly wrong. The first movement shows the artist, the hero of the piece, in thrall of his beloved and lost in his passion for her. The scene of the second is a ball, with the orchestra playing a waltz tune, and the artist intermittently sees his beloved in the crowded room. Our hero fears that his lover may be deceiving him in the third, as he listens to shepherds piping (oboe and English horn) on a distant hill. He takes opium (the recreational drug of Berlioz's day) in the fourth movement with the intent to die, but only hallucinates. In his hallucination, he believes he has killed his beloved and is duly marched to the guillotine (the memory of which must have been pretty strong in early 19th-century France, by the way). He sees his beloved in the final movement in the underworld during a witches' Sabbath, but she is a lowly courtesan at this point. Throughout all of these movements, Berlioz weaves an idée fixe, a motif representing the beloved.\nI mention all of this only because the entity in charge of the School of Music's programs decided to ignore the composer's explicit instructions to distribute his written narrative of Symphonie Fantastique at every performance. \nEnsemble problems plagued the orchestra throughout the first movement, and the ball scene was far too ragged. Larkin skipped the repeat in the March to the Gallows movement, an increasingly common choice of conductors today but one that is still wrong. The orchestra members were willing executioners, however, passionately dispatching our hero. The Witches' Sabbath is supposed to be frightening, but, in the hands of the woodwind section, it might have been the dance of the cutesy elves.\nThe premiere performance of David Dzubay's "Shadow Dance" began the concert with a foretaste of the colorful instrumental combinations to follow. It updates a Medieval chant to today's harmonic language, and the musicians gave a committed performance. They brought out the frenetic, schizophrenic character of the piece well.\nToday, the Symphonic and Concert bands play at 8 p.m. at the Musical Arts Center.