Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra

The HRO got off to a slow start Friday night, but it was worth the wait. Their closing performance of Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe was magnificent. It was the best I've ever heard them play.

Perhaps it's just that I'm an incurable Ravel fan. His harmonies include the most luscious, delicious chords in the history of music. His instrumentation is wizardly: the slow buildup from one section of instruments to another in the opening bars of Daphnis puts you, magically, right in the middle of a mythical forest. And his dexterity in creating, and changing, the most emotional of moods affects the glands like nothing after the Baroque.

But such admiration would normally lead to overcritical judgment of interpretation. So you can believe me when I say that the HRO's performance was perfect. There were no detectable wrong notes, or questionable tonalities, or muffed passages. Yannatos's command of his orchestra's dynamics was admirable. The large entrances of the brass choir were thrilling. The trumpets handled a speedy passage with facile precision. And, of course, Daphnis et Chloe gave the HRO an opportunity to show off its unsurpassable solo flutist, Karen Monson.

I wish I could be so enthusiastic about the rest of the concert. Mozart's 29th Symphoney suffered from out-of-tune high notes by the violins. The horns nearly saved the day with, mirabile dictu, a splendid performance--until the very end, when an ascending passage brought on the inevitable fub.

Yannatos's ballet Oedipus, would probably be all right if it were performed with dancers. It effectively realizes its goal of conveying the kind of discomforting moods one associates with the tragedy of Oedipus. But as a concert piece it doesn't quite make it. It has its moments: an exciting crescendo in the first section, or the sometimes startling rhythmic attacks by the strings. Generally, however, it is disappointing. A few times the strings start a vamp that in most modern composers would lead to a moving buildup. But here the woodwinds sneak in a few insipid, undefined attempts, and then everything collapses. Given such uninspired--but difficult--music, the orchestra seemed to perform well, although Yannatos's uncharacteristically active conducting revealed that they were a little insecure.

The opening Canzona Noni Toni for three brass choirs of Gabrieli added insult to the injury the HRO has already meted out to us Renaissance and Baroque buffs. It is bad enough when, as frequently happens, they don't play anything at all from these periods. But to take this delightful Renaissance canzona and brutally massacre it requires real malevolence. Not only were the choirs not together, but one of the trumpets unceasingly insisted on shlurping every single high note. The HRO's next two concerts include works by Vivaldi and Bach. Let us hope they redeem themselves by handling them as well as they handled the Ravel.