Cantabrigia Orchestra

With the baseball season in full swing, there is nothing particularly noteworthy about a southpaw on the mound. A southpaw on the podium, however, is another matter. And this rare breed, in the person of Joel Lazar, is what confronted the eighty players and three dozen singers assembled on the Sanders stage last evening. Yet, despite the brevity of their acquaintance with him, those who were bowing and blowing and crowing seemed to have readily overcome being nonplussed by a baton brandished in the let hand.

For some years one of the student staples of our local musical establishment, Lazar has during the past year been faculty conductor of N.Y.U.s University Heights Orchestra, and returned here to offer metropolitan amateurs a chance to join in corporate music-making during the long hot summer -- and few places are hotter than Sanders in the summer, a fact that wisely led Lazars changes to follow the lead of last Monday's musicians and dispense with jackets and ties (except for those ties indicated in the music itself).

Lazar chose a program of three chestnuts - or, more accurately, two oaks separated by a lilac bush. Wagners Meistersinger Prclude, Vaughan Williams Serehade to Music, and Beethoven's Eroica.

In one of his marvelous conversations with Eckermann, the elderly Goethe once remarked that the difference between Classicism and Romanticism was the difference between health and disease. He did not live to know the work of the arch Romantic Wagner, who could reflect both: if Tristan suggests illness, Die Meistersinger is a paragon of health. Last night, the latter's Prelude - which more successfully survives detachment from the whole than most of the other Wagner excerpts that turn up in the concert hall - came through with a good deal of its innate robustness and exuberance. In some places the strings were overpowered by the brass, and the complex contrapuntal combination of themes was not always clear. The two climactic cymbal clashes at the end, however, came off so perfectly that the player smiled with satisfaction.

Using as its text the loveliest passage from The Merchant of Venice the Serenade was composed in 1938 for the jubilee of the great conductor Sir Henry Wood(who once turned down the directorship of the Boston Symphony), but has justifiably long outlived its original occasion. The piece is stylistic conservatism at its best; for sheer sensuous serenity it would be hard to beat. Yesterday's players were joined by thirty-odd members of the Summer School Chorus, well prepared by Professor Harold C. Schmidt. The concertmistress solo fiddling wandered off pitch a bit, and the orchestra in general never got as soft as it should have until the final cadence; but there were delectable sounds all the same, and of the five vocal soloists Vicki Hall's soprano was simply ravishing.

The evening's best playing came in the first three movements of the Eroica. Lazar led with authority, observed all the repeats, and superimposed no un-indicated retards. The tone had body, and the rhythm had vitality. Carl Schlaikjer's oboe-playing and Daniel Farber's kettledrumming were particularly expert; and all the hornists negotiated their treacherous parts with real heroism. There were some bad moments, such as the ragged fiddling at the start of the first movement's coda and the end of the funeral march; and a woodwind passage in the trio of the scherzo was muffed the first time, but went admirably the second. The finale, which is the one weak movement in the symphony, suffered much of the time from a lack of ensemble, and had doubtless gone much better in rehearsal.

But all this is really beside the point - as were the comments of those who deplored the choice of such well-worn works. These performers were not out to compete with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. They were not out to play for the audience, or for the critics, half so much as to play for themselves, to wind up a summer's intensive immersion in three masterpieces by three master composers - in short, to experience greatness tangibly.

Finally, let me point out that the concert was free, unlike all the previous ones sponsored by the 1967 Summer School. The top brass and woodwind would do well to consider reverting to the policy of earlier summers and making all its concerts free - at least to students - since the Summer School reportedly shows a fat profit every year. It is really niggardly to ask students to pay money to sit it a Turkish bath and listen to music saddled with obbligati by fire sirens, motorcycle mufflers, and horns of the non-french variety.