A small string orchestra is well-suited for music of the Baroque, and indeed, there have been a number of such groups, full of young, eager players, founded in the past decade or so.
Such a one is I Musici Estensi, established in Milan in 2004, and it’s known not just for its Baroque performances, but music of many other eras. Saturday night, the group was joined at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach by members of the Symphony of the Americas for one of its final Summerfest concerts.
The 17-piece ensemble thus created was led by SOTA founder and conductor James Brooks-Bruzzese, who conducted the first piece wielding the baton of the American composer Ferde Grofé (Grand Canyon Suite), which had been presented to him at the beginning of the evening by a benefactor. The program offered a varied mix of works, some of them successful, some less so, but at its best it showcased a good group of musicians adept at playing widely different kinds of styles.
The concert also presented two new works written specifically for the group by contemporary Italian composers. One of them was an untitled piece for string orchestra by I Musici Estensi’s musical director, Lorenzo Turchi-Floris, who was on hand to conduct the work.
It turned out to be a well-wrought, expertly orchestrated piece with a melancholy cast but plenty of energy, and a melodic and harmonic framework reminiscent of Nino Rota or Bernard Herrmann. It began with a mysterious, Webern-like tapestry of murmuring fragments, though here they were foreshadowings of music to come rather than touches of color for their own sake.
The piece’s chief theme is a memorable seven-note minor-key motif that recurred several times; in its fullest guise over a pulsing string accompaniment, it had an elegant, elegiac feel that was quite attractive. There were good solo moments from cellist Ilaria Calabro and violist Sandro Mascaro, who were excellent all evening.
The work ended somewhat unconvincingly, but it seems to me this piece should be a little longer, or perhaps part of a suite, with a fuller ending and perhaps an opening section that wasn’t quite so different from the rest of the music. Still, it’s a good piece, and would be well worth hearing again (audiences at the concerts were given the chance to name it; Turchi-Floris has not yet chosen the winner).
The same high marks can’t be given to the other new work, Guido Galterio’s Remembering Naples, which apparently is intended to be a pops piece that treats popular Neapolitan songs (such as Luigi Denza’s Funiculì, Funiculà) in an involved symphonic way, complete with a big, schlocky piano cadenza and a semi-funky closing section that the sizable audience at the Crest seemed to really enjoy. It was far too tacky and much too overdone to be enjoyable; a lighter hand would have served the source music much better.
Another nice thing about an ensemble of this size its relative sonic transparency. That makes it well-suited for contrapuntal music, which was demonstrated effectively by three other works on the program. One of them, a little fugue (Fugata) and tango by the Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla, was presented in a new arrangement by SOTA concertmaster Orlando Forte, and it ably transferred Piazzolla’s tango band style to string orchestra, with good solo work by Calabro, Mascaro, Forte himself and Svetlana Forte, who led the second violins.
Two of the movements from Gustav Holst’s popular St. Paul’s Suite, the Jig and Finale, also sounded vigorous and well-played, but it was the Baroque rarity, a concerto (Op. 6, No. 12) by Evaristo Dell’Abaco (1675-1742), that showed off this group to fine effect. In the same vein as contemporaries like Vivaldi, Dell’Abaco’s concerto had a lighter, brighter sound than the great Venetian, with a primary theme in the first movement that shot off rockets of upward scales. The perfunctory second movement surely was meant to show off improvisations by a solo player, probably the concertmaster. That didn’t happen here, but it should have, and would have added another interesting element to the concert.
Flutist Marilyn Maingart took the solo spotlight before the close of the first half with her own arrangement of the finale of the Violin Concerto (in A minor, Op. 53) of Antonin Dvořák. Maingart has hit on something here: This does make a good flute piece, though string orchestra and piano accompaniment leaves a little something to be desired coloristically. She played it reasonably well, but the glissandi she sprinkled throughout the solo part sounded forced rather than spontaneous.
There were two other works on the program, selections from Anton Arensky’s Tchaikovsky Variations, which was lovely and featured lots of warm Romantic string sound, and an all-strings arrangement of the Prelude from Verdi’s opera La Traviata, in honor of the composer’s 200th birthday. This is a famously treacherous opening since it has to sneak in out of the silence and be precisely in tune to make its best effect. Intonation was not all that precise in the initial measures, but the theme that will become so important in the opera — Amami, Alfredo — was rich and inviting.
The concert ended with an unusual encore, a once-familiar piece now shelved because it features an obsolete machine: Leroy Anderson’s The Typewriter. Turchi-Floris came out to “play” the typewriter in a wince-inducing bit of humor as journalist “Lorenzo Macaroni.”
Anderson was a very skillful composer who will always be with us at Christmastime because of Sleigh Ride, but we can live without The Typewriter, particularly when the battered machine used here had a sticky carriage return and an intermittently working bell. Turchi-Floris, like most people today, doesn’t really know how to play the typewriter anymore, and that’s perfectly OK. Maybe if conductors insist on programming this piece, perhaps it can be adapted for iPad or laptop, or texting on a phone. After all, there are a lot more sounds today’s word-processing machines can make than clacking keys and a ringing bell.
The Symphony of the Americas’ 2013-14 season opens Oct. 15 at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts in Fort Lauderdale. The guest soloist is Argentine violinist Alejandro Drago, who will premiere his own Mysteries of Buenos Aires. For more information, call 954-335-7002 or visit www.symphonyoftheamericas.org.