Just for the record, there weren’t “Too Many Oboes” at Saturday night’s Allegro concert at F&M’s Barshinger Center — when they’re played this well, you can never have enough. The four oboists — section leader Jeffrey O’Donnell, Emery DeWitt, Jill Marchione and Megan Norcross — played in various configurations, exhibiting, to steal a phrase from the program notes, “effortless grace, spontaneous charm and sturdy musical substance.” It was a remarkable demonstration of ensemble playing for this notoriously intractable instrument, and they made it sound easy. But these words, originally applied to Telemann’s Concerto for Three Oboes, apply to the orchestra, and the program, as a whole. The orchestra played with spirit and feeling throughout and the program was a delight from beginning to end.
Telemann wrote over 3,000 pieces in his lifetime, which, Artistic Director Brian Norcross pointed out, amounted to a composition every four or five days during his working life. “What did you do today?” he asked before launching into the baroque work which, in typical concerto grosso style, had the group of three oboists and the string orchestra in a continuous dialog, phrase answering phrase in brief statements in the first movement and cascading notes in the last. All four oboists were featured in the Concerto a Due Cori No. 1 by Handel, a seven-movement work which incorporated some of his popular operatic themes. Audiences of the time would have recognized these “greatest hits;” the one most recognizable would be the second movement’s “For the Glory of the Lord” tune, familiar from “Messiah.” (Have you ever noticed how a classical-music audience behaves when an orchestra plays a famous melody? It’s like a very subtle version of “the wave,” and it’s possibly caused by hundreds of simultaneous nudges.)
At 15, Mozart was already a musical veteran and his Divertimento No. 1 shows the beginning of his musical maturity. It also shows his innovation; according to Norcross, he was the first to add clarinets, a folk instrument, to the orchestra. Two of the oboists switched over to English horns — neither English nor horns, these deeper-voiced cousins of the oboe were misnamed for their “angled” mouthpieces, Norcross explained. Mozart’s three-movement Symphony No. 38, the “Prague,” written when Mozart was 30, closed the program. Scored for pairs of instruments — two trumpets, two horns, two oboes, two flutes and two bassoons — as well as strings and timpani, this was the “big” work on the program and it got a fine performance. Despite Norcross’s warning that a slow movement might seem like being caught behind six buggies on a back road, I found the intertwining themes (one major, one minor, and one sinuously chromatic) endlessly fascinating in the second movement, and the players captured all the flash and fireworks you could want in the final movement.
The concert drew a sizable crowd to the Barshinger center, and the third and last concert will be Saturday, Aug. 9. Not only does the program sound appealing (”The Great Outdoors,” works by Respighi, Copland and Beethoven) but season tickets for the 2009 season will be on sale. Works by Bach, Mozart, Haydn and Mendelssohn are being planned, as well as a performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. (Just let that one sink in a bit.)
