concert review: New Millennium Chamber Orchestra

This local volunteer group decided to make "mystery" the theme of its fall concert, which I heard on Sunday in Palo Alto. And what classical work is more mysterious than Edward Elgar's Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 36, better known as the "Enigma" Variations?

Conductor James Richard Frieman explained what's enigmatic about the variations: that Elgar claimed the theme was actually in counterpoint with an unplayed famous melody, but he'd never say what it was, dismissed any guesses proposed, and nobody has ever come up with a generally accepted answer. Maybe Elgar was putting us on. He also depicted the personalities, as he saw them, of his personal friends in the individual variations, but hid them behind initials or nicknames. These have all been unearthed, though.

The performance came off nicely, though the orchestra had to slow down notably for the thunderous "Troyte". The famous slow variation "Nimrod" was well-paced and stately, not too slow. The turn from the profound "Nimrod" to the light and trilling "Dorabella" is the most clashing anti-climax in classical music. Wise conductors counter this by taking a long pause between them, as if it were the beginning of a new movement. Frieman was very wise. He did the same thing in several other places.

The other half of the program consisted of pops pieces with grotesque topics and spooky music appropriate for Halloween, a different application of the word "mystery" perhaps. These were all old favorites which were mostly on the Readers Digest Festival of Light Classical Music LP box set that was my childhood introduction to this repertoire. But you don't get to hear any of them very often at serious concerts.

The biggest treat of the bunch had to be Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain. The composer's rough and unpolished style was a perfect dish for a rough volunteer orchestra to sink its teeth into. The best performance came in Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre, thanks to the fully professional solo violin work of concertmaster Colyn Fischer. Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King just has to be a really easy piece to play. Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette is apparently still mostly remembered as the source of the theme music for Alfred Hitchcock's TV show, so even though there can't have been more than a few people present old enough to have watched it (I wasn't, having been still too young for stuff like that when it left the air), Frieman gave his spoken introduction to the piece with a Hitchcock impression.

NMCO's next concert will be a delectable selection of English landscape music by Vaughan Williams, Delius, Holst (no, not The Planets), and the rarely-played Granville Bantock (about time!). It'll be March 2 and 3 in San Mateo and Palo Alto.