concert review: Monterey Symphony

It takes at least an hour and a half, when there's no traffic (which is rarely the case) to drive from here to Carmel, where the Monterey Symphony plays, and it feels farther away than that. So it's not surprising that I'd only gone once, about 20 years ago, because they were playing Gluck's haunting Iphigénie en Aulide Overture. (Here, this is the recording I discovered in my university music department's record library in my student days, and came back and listened to every day for weeks.)

On the same program, they did pretty well with Mendelssohn's "Reformation" Symphony, a work needing a lot of doing well to be successful at all, but made a total hash out of Bruckner's Te Deum.

So, not a consistent orchestra. But it's been 20 years since then, most of the local professional orchestras have improved greatly over that time, and Monterey has acquired a new music director a couple years ago. So I was primed as heck to get to a concert including a work I'd much like to hear but which is never done, Ralph Vaughan Williams's A Pastoral Symphony, also known as his Third. RVW's nine symphonies don't often make it to US concert halls, but I've managed to hear five others live over the years, though I had to go to London to catch one of them. But the Pastoral? Not a chance. Its title, and its consisting of four movements, "all of them slow" (as the composer quipped, accurately enough), have given it a reputation of being utterly static.

But it isn't. Much of it is tough, even wiry, and it works even better if you hear it as what it really is, not a placid "cowpat school" product, but a memorial to the soldiers who died in the pastoral fields of France in WW1. Though already in his 40s, RVW had served there as a medical aide, driving horse-drawn ambulance wagons.

And then I mentioned to my editor that I was going to this, in place of some other concert he suggested that I cover, so he put this on my schedule instead, and here's the review. I wasn't expecting how much music director Jayce Ogren would emphasize the WW1 background of this work, to the extent of having war scenes projected on the back wall during it, and framing the entire concert as a contemplative, meditative event.

It worked very well, and the performance of the Pastoral gave much satisfaction. RVW's distinct orchestral sound came through consistently, and the whole symphony was an opportunity to bask in it.

And the rest of the concert was good too. Britten's Serenade song cycle was much more incisive than the last time I heard it; Pärt's Cantus came off with an effective production of its ghostly ending; and Adolphus Hailstork is always a reliable workaday composer.

I went to the Sunday matinee performance, a tricky proposition as there's no available parking in Carmel on weekends. The signs on the theater parking lots saying concert parking only didn't stop anyone. But I arrived early enough that there were a couple fugitive spaces left, trudged off to have lunch at a seafood place I remembered being good from my last visit to Carmel ten years ago - it still was - and came back to sit and wait for the concert. It was worth the trouble.