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The Gallic Touch
by Gary Lemco
 

     With the final, rollicking and irreverent strains of Ibert's Divertissement (1930) resounding through the Los Altos United Methodist Church, Sunday, February 2, 2003, conductor David Ramadanoff concluded a thoroughly ingratiating, predominantly French program with the Master Sinfonia Chamber Orchestra. This second afternoon concert by the fine, local ensemble featured violinist Joseph Gold in the only non-Gallic offering, the Violin Concerto (1982) by Filip Pavlov, as well as orchestral selections by Ravel and Poulenc, whose G Minor Organ Concerto enjoyed the splendid playing of Larry Crummer.
     Maurice Ravel's bittersweet Le Tombeau de Couperin (1919) opened Ramadanoff's program. The four-movement suite has a romantic character in the face of World War I, although its "ancient style" is a throwback to the idealized age of the French clavecinists. The Master Sinfonia applied a shimmering patina to this delicate score, whose oboe soli and occasionally pentatonic writing have some of the wistfulness of the composer's Ma Mere l'Oye. Elegant, nostalgic, soberly poised, the music allowed oboe Meave Cox to shine, making one wish to hear her (and soloist Gold together) in Sheherazade. 
     Followed organist Larry Crummer in Poulenc's G Minor Concerto, a five-movement sonic spectacular, whose alternately toccata and meditative sections run the gamut of emotions that haunt Phantom of the Opera to Last Year at Marienbad. Crummer shared the pyrotechnics with timpanist Len Sperry, both electric in the bravura and virtuoso passages; yet Ramadanoff kept the light hand on this music that marked all the French pieces, whose character resists the heavy tread and insists on leger-de-main.
     Violinist Joseph Gold, a Heifetz protégé, joined the Master Sinfonia for Bulgarian composer Filip Pavlov's Violin Concerto. In two movements marked Moderato sostenuto and Allegro assai, this vivacious piece owes debts to Bartók and Shostakovich; and while it avoids lingering in any tonality for long, it has a strong lyric element that has some autobiographical significance for Pavlov, again in the spirit of Schumann's Carnaval and Shostakovich's D-E-flat, C and B-flat musical acronym. Many of the lyric impulses are confined to two-bar phrases; then, the solo and orchestra rush forward or canter in marshal figures. Gold traversed the tricky registrations and harmonics with aplomb, he and Ramadanoff having premiered the work for North America in 2002.
    The concluding Ibert Divertissement seems to have as its premise that anything Kurt Weill can do a Frenchman can do better. This is Ibert the boulevardier, the wit and sophisticate who inherited the mantle of Satie and passed it on to Poulenc. In five sections, it parodies all sorts of musical styles, reducing Mendelssohn and the Viennese waltz to dance-hall sleaze. The Finale is right out of Mack Sennett, "kitchen sink" music that sent us reeling with the precision and the joie de vivre that Master Sinfonia consistently achieves.