The Master Sinfonia Chamber Orchestra, David Ramadanoff conducting, concluded their 40th season with an all-Beethoven program at Valley Presbyterian Church, Portola Valley, Saturday May 7 2005. With pianist Mack McCray assisting in the Fourth Piano Concerto, Mr. Ramadanoff revealed at least three sides of Beethoven’s volcanic character, whose incandescent fires of inspiration often seem to transcend music itself. The Coriolan Overture in C Minor, Op. 62, with its dark passions; the G Major Piano Concerto, a veritable Aeolian Harp among keyobard concertos; and the eternally joyful Symphony No, 8 in F Major, Op. 93, with its iconoclastic look at the very classical tradition into which Beethoven was born and whose scope and syntax he altered forever.

Providing his usual, incisive commentary prior to each piece, conductor Ramadanoff led an explosive and brooding performance of the Coriolanus Overture (1807), based on a Roman-style tragedy by Beethoven’s colleague Collin, rather than the more familiar treatment by Shakespeare. Trapped between love and honor, Coriolanus yields to the dictates of his heart, and the storms and stresses of his dilemma are matched by Beethoven’s two-fisted evocation of dramatic fate. Sudden sforzati, powerful stops and starts, a staggered, if not shattered presentation of the opening rhythmic pulse at the conclusion, all had Ramadanoff and his forces on quick over-drive, attempting to balance the intense concentration of warring impulses.

Following the tragic, Dionysiac figures of the Coriolan, the Fourth Piano Concerto (1806) made a splendid tonic, especially given that its own, four-beat rhythm in the first movement derive from the ubiquitous C Minor Symphony, but here leashed to the chariot of Apollo. Soloist McCray, despite a hard, Serkin-esque patina, a ferocious trill, to his keyboard sonority, brought as well a plastic, fluid line to the interweaving between him and orchestra, whose own contribution did not lack for girth as well as lyricism, Ramadanoff often coaxing a chamber-music atmosphere from his rapt players . Providing elaborate ornamentation and bravura filigree to the main themes, the piano part sang with fervor and guarded drama, especially in the uncanny Andante movement, oft described as Orpheus’ taming the maenads, with echoes of that musical persona’s pleas to the angry spirits in Gluck’s treatment of the myth. McCray’s first movement cadenza, florid and impassioned, seemd to adumbrate the improvised character of the C Minor Fantasy that Beethoven wrote, Op. 80, as a study-piece for the Ninth Symphony. The last movement, a virile Rondo, achieved both a grand line and an exaltation of spirit that had this auditor’s thinking of veteran pianist, Conrad Hansen’s, classic interpretation of this lovely score, a thought Mr. McCray coincidentally shared with me in our brief interview.

The Eighth Symphony in F Major (1812), which concluded the program, is a happy distillation of the classical procedures Beethoven had thoroughly imbued and the mastery of which conquered his debilitating deafness. There is Homeric humor in its witty alternation of duple and triple meters, its bouncy colors--which permitted the Master Sinfonia bassoons to shine--and its incredible compression of harmonic and contrapuntal techniques Beethoven had employed as far back as his Eroica Symphony. Both muscular and lithe, the playing under Ramadanoff had textural clarity in the fugato and stretto sections of the Allegro vivace e con brio and a frothy wit for the Allegretto, a kind of metronomic farce conceived for an invention by Maalzel, a “panharmonicon.” Reverting to the olden Menuetto for its third movement, the writing called upon some polished clarinet playing and some less secure horn riffs. The ebullient finale, with its tympani in octaves, had that breadth and largesse of spirit which marks Beethoven’s grand style, and had the entire audience thoroughly engaged in Beethoven’s fond energies that continue to beguile us all.