Vox Ama Deus plays Beethoven

Most smaller local music organizations fill some specialized niche, like early music or new music. Valentin Radu's Vox Ama Deus organization normally plays Baroque music and music from the Mozart-Haydn era, but Radu is one music director who's willing to push against the limits Heaven has imposed on organizations with modest budgets.

For the final concert of Vox's silver anniversary season, Radu took on two opuses normally played only by major orchestras working with big time international soloists: the Beethoven violin concerto and the Ninth Symphony.

The Ninth Symphony. The one you mean when you don't mention the composer's name.

For the concerto, Radu didn't even bring in a guest violinist. The soloist was his regular concertmaster, Thomas DiSarlo, who returned after the intermission and resumed his normal role, without any indication that he had just assayed a work normally played by soloists who head back to their hotel rooms as soon as they've finished their one and only chore for the night.

DiSarlo is obviously not one of the legendary violinists whom all fully qualified connoisseurs listen to on the recordings stored in their encyclopedic collections. As far as I know, he was playing the concerto for the first time. But he turned in a solid, perfectly satisfactory performance. If you wanted to spend the first night of your weekend hearing a good live performance of the Beethoven concerto, DiSarlo and his colleagues gave you their money's worth.

You would also have heard things you don't normally hear when you listen to a performance by a standard major orchestra.

Changing the balance

Most modern orchestras employ the number of winds Beethoven specified, but they beef up the strings, typically to at least ten musicians in the first violin section. The other string sections are approximately the same size.

The Vox Amadeus violin sections, by contrast, seat only five musicians apiece, and the viola and cello sections are even smaller. The result is a big change in the orchestra's balance. The winds become more prominent, and Beethoven's works acquire contrasts and blends that you don't hear in most performances.

Radu enhanced this effect by seating the winds and the percussion in a semi-circle around the back of the orchestra. The brasses were located about where they're normally seated, but the woodwinds moved closer to the audience. The piccolo and the flutes were positioned on the far left, near the front of the stage.

Country barn dance

During the final movement of the symphony, the orchestra sounded like a big, festive marching band. The lone piccolo, stationed right at the front, pierced through the strings when it launched into its big solo, like a piper leading a country barn dance. The finale wasn't just an ode to joy; it was an exuberant outpouring of joy.

One of the great moments in music is the long passage for cellos and basses that introduces the choral finale. I love the sound of massed cellos, which you obviously can't get from two cellos and two basses. Instead, the passage acquired a pleasing chamber music quality. Like the other changes created by the reduced forces, it was just as good, in its way, as the effects produced by standard forces, and it cast a new light on the score.

The final movement in the Ninth ordinarily tends to get the most attention, but Radu conducted all four movements with vision and understanding. The first movement delivered force and pace without sacrificing Beethoven's melodies and included some particularly silvery flute work.

Seating the singers

The skitterish rhythms of the second movement scherzo can sound trivial in the wrong hands, but Radu turned it into a happy romp. The slow third movement— my personal favorite— sounded, as it should, like a long visit to another, less troubled world.

Radu even came up with an innovative seating arrangement for the vocal quartet. The four soloists all acquitted themselves with flair, but Beethoven gave the quartet a modest role: They sing only for two relatively short intervals during the choral finale. The rest of the time they sit in their chairs while the chorus and the orchestra blast away.

Radu handled this situation by seating the quartet on the far left side of the stage. The singers had to file across the stage when they made their entrances and exits; on the other hand, they didn't have to sit in front of the orchestra, in full view of the audience, trying not to look like wallflowers while the chorus erupted into a frenzy of exultation and carried the final moments toward the sky.