Chamber Orchestra plays Beethoven and Mendelssohn

During the decades when it was led by its founder, Marc Mostovoy (1964-2004), the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia focused on music composed for small orchestras, such as Baroque music and the works of Mozart and Haydn. Its second conductor, Ignat Solzhenitysn (2004-10), expanded its repertoire by presenting symphonies and concertos normally reserved for modern symphony orchestras. Solzhenitsyn even led a chamber orchestra version of Beethoven’s Eroica.

The Chamber Orchestra’s current conductor, Dirk Brossé, has continued that encroachment on the big orchestras’ turf. His ensemble opened its new season with a program that could have been presented, in its entirety, by the Philadelphia Orchestra: Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, followed by Mendelssohn’s First Violin Concerto and Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony.

This kind of Chamber Orchestra concert inevitably raises a question: Do we hear anything we wouldn’t hear in a big orchestra performance?

A nimbler Beethoven

As far as Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony is concerned, the answer is a definite yes. As Solzhenitsyn has pointed out, modern orchestras double the strings, but they retain the same number of winds that Beethoven listed. The Chamber Orchestra performance restored the balance and introduced a lighter, brighter Beethoven.

The contrast was especially noticeable when the winds played with the lower half of the string section. The Chamber Orchestra deploys four violas, three cellos and two basses. The three sections combined employ fewer musicians than the Philadelphia Orchestra’s standard cello section, which normally contains ten to 12 cellists.

The audience also met a nimbler Beethoven. Brossé used the tempos that Beethoven indicated in his manuscript and conducted the first and fourth movements at a faster clip than normal. In his remarks after the concert, Brossé argued that a large orchestra couldn’t maintain the tempo that he had pulled out of his musicians.

Beethoven’s Fourth tends to be overshadowed by his Third, Fifth, and Sixth. Brossé’s approach lifted it out of that also-ran status. At times, in fact, it sounded just as “heroic” as the Third. Its slow movement isn’t labeled “Funeral March,” like the slow movement in the Eroica, but it possesses the same processional quality, applied with a lighter touch.

No household name, but”¦.

His orchestra’s nimbleness served Brossé well in the Midsummer Night’s Dream overture, as the score bounced, like Shakespeare’s play, between bumptious farce and moonlit fantasy.

The afternoon’s soloist, the pianist HJ Lim, was another example of the high-powered newcomers currently crowding the international circuit. Lim maintains a schedule that keeps her hopping between continents on a weekly basis, but I hadn’t heard of her before I received my Chamber Orchestra season brochure, and I’m certain most of the people in the audience hadn’t heard of her either.

Like the other young stars the Chamber Orchestra has introduced to Philadelphia, Lim proved that you needn’t be a household name to deliver a bravura performance. In Mendelssohn’s first piano concerto she flooded the Perelman Theater with a torrent of closely linked notes in the first movement, as the score demands, and delivered a spirited, driving finish in the third.

I would have preferred more of the sensitive, nuanced touch that I hear in the work of my favorite pianists, but that may be too much to ask when a concerto puts so much emphasis on pace and zest.

In the slow movement, Mendelssohn gave the orchestra its most memorable interlude: a beautiful passage for the lower strings in which the cellos play above the violas. The cellos deserve a special mention, and I can take advantage of the chamber orchestra’s economical size and name the entire section: James J. Cooper, James Holesovsky, and Elizabeth Thompson.

Art and Buddhism

The Chamber Orchestra follows the Sunday concerts with a “classical conversation” that usually features the conductor and the guest artist. Brossé’s dialogue with Lim went on longer than usual and covered some weighty subjects.

Lim is an exceptionally thoughtful young woman whose bio reports that she started studying piano at three, in her native Korea, and at 12 “decided, on her own, to relocate to France, where she immersed herself in the musical world of the composers who had shaped her early years.” The audience was treated to a conversation between two very serious artists who discussed the nature of art, the purpose of music, Buddhist philosophy, and their personal ambitions and approaches to their work.

The after-concert conversations don’t always venture into such deep waters. But the ticket buyers who skip them are missing an opportunity for useful enlightenment.