Review: Tulsa Camerata dances the tango

By JAMES D. WATTS JR. World Scene Writer
Published: 12/17/2010 1:34 PM
Last Modified: 12/17/2010 1:34 PM

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that, in spite of a program that included music by Bach and Mozart, the hit of the Tulsa Camerata’s concert Thursday night was a collection of tangos.

This new chamber music repertory company titled its concert “Winters, Nights,” with music selected, according to Camerata board member and master of ceremonies Jason Heilman, to evoke the convivial atmosphere of people gathering together in various locales.

This included Argentina, home of composer Astor Piazzolla, whose “Four Seasons of Buenos Aires” was the highlight of the concert at the Cascia Hall PAC.

Piazzolla took the music of the street — the tango, a dance supposedly born in the brothels Argentina — and elevated it to high art, but without losing the music’s essentially earthy character. You hear a Piazzolla tango and, no matter how formally complex and challenging it may be, you can almost envision people dancing along to it.

The performance by pianist Nathan Fifield, violinist Winona Fifield and cellist Krassimira Figg has all the drama and passion one would expect. Figg’s playing in the third movement, in particular, was most impressive, as she made the melodies soar with a fluid, voice-like sound.

It was a performance that brought the crowd to its feet and that most of the audience was still discussing after the concert was over.

At the other end of the spectrum was Mozart’s “A Musical Joke,” a piece in which the composer’s sense of humor and mischief is allowed to run rampant.

Heilman pointed out that the German title of the piece is better translated “Some Musical Fun,” which is a more accurate description. The piece is Mozart somewhat gleefully ignoring all the conventions and niceties of classical composition, with themes that never develop, harmonies that never resolve, mistakes that get determinedly repeated, and solos — like the violin cadenza in the third movement, played with a kind of manic glee by Liza Villareal — that are flashy and pointless.

By the time the ensemble gets to the fourth movement, things really begin to fall apart, as hornists Michelle Exley-Johnson and Lanette Compton emit noises that sound like an elephant who’s just stepped on a thorn, and the piece concludes with the six players ending up in five different keys.

To open and close the evening, the Tulsa Camerata went for baroque — with Corelli’s “Christmas” Concerto and Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 4.

There isn’t much that’s Christmasy about Corelli’s piece, other than a sense of serenity and good cheer that permeated the music, in the way that the solo trio of violinists Villareal and Laura Talbott and cellist Figg wove their melodic lines in and around the music of the ensemble.

Heilman pointed out that the ensemble for the Brandenburg had “as soloists the concertmaster of the Tulsa Opera Orchestra, the principal flute of the Tulsa Symphony and the principal flute of the Signature Symphony, with an ensemble led by the music director of Tulsa Ballet.

“That’s about as prestigious a group you can get to play this piece in Tulsa,” he said.

And the group lived up to its billing, with flutists John Rush and Dana Higbee and violinist Winona Fifield handling the almost continuous music they had to play with an easy grace and great spirit. The only rough spots were in the third movement, when cellist Diane Bucchianeri started before the rest of the ensemble was ready, and a slightly ragged final few notes — one of the rare times in the evening when this group, regardless of the configuration of players, did not seem perfectly in sync.

Read more from this Tulsa World article at http://www.tulsaworld.com/scene/article.aspx?subjectid=269&articleid=201...