Piffaro: The Renaissance Band kicked off its 34th season this past weekend with three performances of their show, "Water, Wind & Waves: The Wind Band at Sea."[/caption]

by Michael Caruso

Piffaro, the Renaissance Band, opened its 34th concert season this past weekend with a series of three performances of “Water, Wind & Waves.” The first took place Friday, Sept. 14, in the Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral in West Philadelphia while the third was given Sunday, Sept. 16, in Christ Church Christiana Hundred in Wilmington DE.

In between those two dates, Piffaro’s merry band of period instrumentalists was joined by tenor Garrett Eucker and baritone Jean Bernard Cerin at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Saturday evening, Sept. 15. Although these concerts marked the earliest start of the season for Piffaro in its history, Saturday’s performance drew a large and enthusiastic audience to follow the Band as it traversed the life of musicians onboard a ship during the Age of Discovery and a period of unrelenting warfare.

During these 34 seasons of concerts, it’s been a delight to watch and hear the development of Piffaro from an ensemble that initially made its mark bringing to the public works most of us had never even heard on recordings to one of consummate artistry. In the beginning, Piffaro concerts were events of discovery. You had the chance to encounter music that was as new to your ears as if it had been composed the day before the concert. Of course, performances were solid – these were, after all, professional musicians – but it was the music, itself, that held you in thrall.

As the seasons went by, however, and the repertoire became more familiar, the quality of the playing improved step by step. Piffaro concerts were no longer a matter of what you heard but how well what you heard was played.

Saturday night’s concert was in many ways the consummation of this arc of development. Not only was the roster of scores played and sung with unquestioned technical prowess, but that proficiency was securely placed in the service of supreme musicality.

As is always the case, directors Joan Kimball and Robert Wiemken assembled a programmatic narrative of works that took the listener along a captivating journey. This time around the music brought us back to the 16th century when seafaring captains employed musicians to entertain, inspire and mourn with their sailors. We joined “The Waits” (the town band) of Norwich, England, as the musicians joined Sir Francis Drake on his voyage to the coast of Portugal. We boarded ship, took to the high seas, offered prayers at the end of the day, experienced the battle, mourned the dead and finally returned home.

While all the program’s sections were played and sung beautifully, it was the penultimate “movement” – “Battle’s Aftermath; Mourning & Prayer” – that offered the evening’s most unforgettable renditions. It might have been the result of these four selections being the concert’s most potent, but for whatever reason, they received interpretations of sublime beauty.

Peter Philips’ “Pavan dolorosa” for recorder consort delineated a profound sadness worthy of the slow movement of a symphony by Gustav Mahler with one-tenth the length. Eucker and Cerin sang Thomas Tallis’ “Miserere nostri” with a level of lyrical expressivity that dispelled the notion that Gregorian plainsong lacks emotional affect and that Renaissance polyphony is spiritual but not visceral. The purity of tuning in Tallis’ “In ieiunio et fletu” was breathtaking while the balance between Eucker’s ethereal tenor and Cerin’s burnished baritone in his “Hear the voices and prayer” was operatic in timbre yet intimate in consolation.

From start to finish, the concert showed Piffaro to be playing not just at its historic best but to be considered among the finest period instruments ensembles in the world.

SEASON OPENS

Music director Yannick Nezet-Seguin officially opened the Philadelphia Orchestra’s season of subscription concerts in the Kimmel Center’s Verizon Hall Friday, Sept. 14. The Maestro chose a program that made manifest his knowledge of the many musical traditions that grace the Philadelphians’ legacy.

The concert opened with the world premiere of Nico Muhly’s “Liar” Suite from his opera, “Marnie.” Next came pianist Andre Watts as the soloist in Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor, Opus 16. After intermission, Nezet-Seguin and the Orchestra played Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, Opus 45.

Former Germantown resident and pianist Andre Watts was the soloist in Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor, Opus 16, which was part of the Philadelphia Orchestra's season-opening concert on September 14. (Photo courtesy of Alexa Vecchione)[/caption]

The Maestro introduced the Muhly by pointing out that the full opera is soon to be presented by New York City’s Metropolitan Opera, where he is now the music director. He described the commissioned Suite as the first of many collaborative projects between the Philadelphians and the Met.

Cast in one continuous movement but with many distinct sections, Muhly’s score is a far artistic step above Alfred Hitchcock’s tedious 1964 movie starring the iconic Sean Connery and the forgettable Tippi Hedren. Despite the fact that it was partially filmed in Philadelphia, nothing could counterbalance the absence of a single believable word of motivation for any and all of its nonsense. One can only hope that the opera transcends its source material. Nezet-Seguin and the Orchestra made the most of the Suite’s sonic possibilities

Now 72 years old, former Germantown resident Andre Watts is no longer the pianistic “young lion” he once was 62 years ago when he began his storied career. So his rendition of Grieg’s virtuosic Piano Concerto was not the pyrotechnically dazzling affair it was in previous presentations. And yet, by taking a more reasoned interpretive stance and playing with an altogether reasonable appreciation of certain technical limitations, he gave this most popular of Nordic piano concerti a memorable reading.

With his tonal palette more refined than ever and his sense of phrasing more lyrical than in times past, Watts played with a sense of intimate communication that established a revelatory conversation with his audiences that is the essence of Romanticism.

After the interval, Nezet-Seguin and the Philadelphians returned to the Orchestra’s legendary relationship with the towering figure of the last vestige of Russian Romanticism, Sergei Rachmaninoff. His Symphonic Dances of 1940 were his final major work, unless you consider his revision the following year of the 1926 Fourth Piano Concerto, Opus 40. In between that work and the Symphonic Dances, Rachmaninoff composed only two other major scores: the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Opus 43, and the Third Symphony, Opus 44.

While the Symphony was given its world premiere by the Philadelphia Orchestra under music director Leopold Stokowski, the composer specifically dedicated his Symphonic Dances to the Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy, Stokowski’s successor. These performances of the work were recorded “live” by Deutsche Grammaphon for eventual release.

While Nezet-Seguin effectively highlighted Rachmaninoff’s incisive rhythms and brilliant orchestration, he missed out on investing the composer’s unrivaled lyricism with even a hint of the melancholic nostalgia that courses through every note Rachmaninoff wrote even before the Russian Revolution forced him to flee “Mother Russia.” And that silken, string-based “Philadelphia Sound” created and refined by Stokowski and nurtured and perfected by Ormandy was nowhere to be heard in Verizon Hall Friday evening.

In the interest of full disclosure, both Andre Watts and I attended the former Philadelphia Musical Academy and the Peabody Conservatory of Music (Johns Hopkins University) in Baltimore. You can contact NOTEWORTHY at Michael-caruso@comcast.net. To read more of NOTEWORTHY, visit www.chestnuthilllocal.com/Arts/Noteworthy