Intermezzo musicians test their limits

Talented orchestra makes music shine

I take an ever-so-slightly wistful joy in watching the young people who have made Charleston their playground this summer. Strong sets of legs, both male and female, have conveyed me smoothly and expeditiously from place to place in bicycle rickshaws and I reflect that these drivers probably have another two decades left before they discover their knees. (Or do our knees discover us? Either way, they are generally an aggravating fact of daily life by the time we're past our mid-40s.)

Then there is the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra, a group of young soloists who have suddenly been forged into a terrific ensemble. They're all over the place now — in all kinds of concerts, whether playing in chamber groups or in full orchestral array, under the music directorship of Emmanuel Villaume.

And here the nostalgia becomes acute. I remember my own summers as a participant at Tanglewood music center, more than 30 years ago — away from home for the first time, staying up till dawn, discussing everyone from Frederic Chopin to Frank Zappa with fellow students. The soft beauty of the ancient trees, the sustained, intimate contact with artists from around the world, the consecrated professionalism that pervaded one's experience there — all of this helped instill the sense that music could be something on which it was possible to build a life. Suddenly I had peers who understood (and sometimes shared) my obsessions, with whom I could talk of the pieces I was learning on the piano, the compositions I was trying to write, obscure recordings, the proper way to dot a 16th note and the dream of what the late pianist Glenn Gould called "the purpose of art — a gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity."

In a funny way, a young musician's very inexperience acts as a stimulus. It is unlikely that all the members of the Spoleto Festival Orchestra have played, say, Ludwig van Beethoven's "Mass in C" before (which will be heard tonight at Galliard Auditorium under the direction of Dr. Joseph Flummerfelt) and, indeed, most of them have probably spent little time working in such a large ensemble with musicians on their own exalted level.

In short, there is nothing of the routine bored professional "gig" about their playing. No, this is absolutely for real — a group of abundantly talented young men and women testing their limits, with little thought about anything except how to make the music shine.

A few minutes after 5 p.m. on Sunday, three dozen or so Spoleto Festival Orchestra musicians managed to pack themselves into the nave of St. Matthew's Lutheran Church for an

Intermezzo concert. There, amidst the late-afternoon sunlight that streamed through an abundance of stained-glass windows, the group offered clean, precise and soulful performances of music by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Ingram Marshall, under the direction of John Kennedy.

The program began with Vaughan Williams' "The Lark Ascending," very pretty music indeed and, especially in England, one of the most popular works in the classical repertory. Nevertheless, this 1914 composition for solo violin and orchestra is, in many ways, the anti- violin concerto.

Although the solo music is very difficult, any bravura or ostentation on the part of the violinist is absolutely out of place. Instead, the instrument hovers, swoops, soars and trembles gently just above the rest of the earth, as might the lark who gives the piece its name. Brittany Boulding's playing was coolly immaculate and wonderfully serene; she made the most of the music's otherworldly — or, at least, other than human — composure.

All tuba players venerate Vaughan Williams, for it was he who wrote the first, and still the most popular, concerto for their gargantuan instrument. The composer was already in his 80s when he finished this three-movement work in 1954; if the outer movements are cheerily rumbustious (they remind me a bit of being jostled by a friendly crowd) the central Romanza is sweetly lyrical and surprisingly intimate. Aubrey Foard played with such high spirits and easy aplomb that the tuba sounded just as naturally suited to rapid-fire melodies and tender reflections as the flute or clarinet.

The program closed with "Orphic Memories," a work by the contemporary American composer Marshall. I owe a profound debt of gratitude to Marshall: One of his early electronic compositions, "The Fragility Cycles," a distinguished piece in itself, included a reference to Jean Sibelius that was directly responsible for my coming to know and love the Finnish composer's still too-little-known "Symphony No. 6."

Almost 30 years later, Marshall quotes the same symphony's second movement again late in "Orphic Memories." He also begins the piece with a fragment from Igor Stravinsky's grave and haunting "Orpheus." Marshall explains his borrowings thusly: "The quotes and references to composers whose music has entered my memory bank are intended as affectionate homage."

I have often complained about the use of musical quotations. Whenever Charles Ives didn't know how to end a piece, he threw in a snatch of "Bringing in the Sheaves" or "Battle Cry of Freedom" and checked out, in much the same manner that the Monty Python troupe used to suddenly drop a cow on a character who had become tiresome.

But Marshall makes it work: the Sibelius and the Stravinsky somehow belong to "Orphic Memories." It is gentle and affecting music, absolutely up to date while never renouncing the past, and Kennedy led his forces in a performance that was intricately detailed and unfailingly linear.