By Lawrence Toppman
Here’s my favorite factoid about the Brandenburg Concertos: The second of the six was sent into interstellar space half a century ago on the Voyager Golden Record, to give other life forms an idea of the greatest things our civilization had achieved. (So was Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” Quite a twinspin for those aliens.)
All six remind me that beauty, intriguing structure and emotion can be combined in the same music. So it was a pleasure to hear the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra play the third and fifth at its “Bach and Beyond” concert Friday at Carolina Theatre. Between them came a surprisingly moving work for string orchestra by North Carolina-born Caroline Shaw, a chunk of Handel’s first “Water Music” suite, and a strange solo effort by contemporary composer Asako Hirabayashi.
The brief Third Brandenburg opened the show in warm-hearted fashion. It lasts a mere 10 minutes, but the CSO musicians (who, except for the cellos, played on their feet) made it a welcoming curtain-raiser.
Shaw’s “Entr’acte” moved from unity to fragmentation to unity again, and even the disjointed sections (which conductor Christopher James Lees described too strongly as “cacophony”) suggested that the orchestral fabric could never be completely unknit. Shaw wrote the piece after hearing Haydn’s string quartet Op. 77 No. 2, and the CSO gave us what Shaw said she wanted us to hear: “I love the way some music (like the minuets of Op. 77) suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolor transition.”
The “Water Music” excerpts, extracted from my favorite Baroque orchestral piece, wasted an opportunity. We heard only five movements out of nine from the first of Handel’s three suites, probably just enough that the orchestra will never play the whole thing for years. Those received an indifferent performance anyway, suitable more for drowsy courtiers in an overheated palace than King George I and his minions breezing down the Thames. Only the last movement, a hornpipe with piquant wind playing, caught the proper spirit.
Hirabayashi wrote “Dance” to show what an 800-year-old instrument can do in the 21st century. Instead, she showed mostly what the harpsichord can’t do: Because it can’t change dynamics or sustain notes as a piano can, it’s unsuited to the dense Latin dance rhythms Hirabayashi set down in her stop-and-start piece. After a few moments, she’d said everything she had to say.
Keyboard soloist Emily Urbanek had a better chance to show her skills in the big crowd-pleaser, the sixth Brandenburg. It features important solos for flute, violin and harpsichord – indeed, they play the second movement alone – and the three soloists cut striking figures: Flutist Victor Wang in a raspberry jacket, Urbanek in a cranberry coat, violinist Kari Giles in a floor-length dress of spangly emerald green.
Their dreamy second movement reminded us that the greatest Baroque music has soul, not just intellectually appealing order. And Urbanek’s rendition of her extended cadenza in the opening movement, surely the longest in music history for a harpsichord with orchestra, set the crowd cheering even while the rest of the musicians came back in, as if Jimmy Page had played an especially tangy solo at a Led Zeppelin concert.
Baroque music can’t rock as hard as, say, “Johnny B. Goode.” But on this evidence, they belong together on that Golden Record, moving even now toward the farthest reaches of the universe.