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Musica de Camara String Ensemble
Christian Colberg, conductor
The Cathedral of St. Patrick’s
February 11, 2010
The soloists
who participated in this concert “Celebrating 30 Years of
Excellence in Classical Music” were fine ambassadors of Musica
de Camara’s mission to present “Puerto Rican and Hispanic
classical musicians in concert.” And the Musica de Camara String
Ensemble, made up of Hispanic and non-Hispanic players,
presented a beautiful picture of the diversity of this great
city of ours.
After a
special introductory proclamation from the City Council of New
York, presented by its Speaker of the House, Christine Quinn, we
heard a reduced group of the ensemble perform J.S. Bach’s Double
Violin Concerto in D minor, BWV 1043. My worries about how this
piece would fare in the over-reverberant acoustics of the
cathedral were unfounded. The polyphonic textures were clear,
and the expert soloists, Jose Miguel Cueto and Evelyn Estava,
were well balanced. They handled the work’s technical demands
with ease and performed the slow movement with lilting grace. I
did miss the use of a harpsichord continuo to fill in the chords
during the solo passages accompanied by just cello and bass. And
we needed more celli and basses during the tutti sections.
The rest of
the players then joined their colleagues for a luscious
performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasy on a Theme of
Thomas Tallis”. Here, the ensemble’s beautiful, rich sound was
further enhanced by the cathedral’s live acoustics. This is a
perfect piece for this space, but a very important spatial
aspect of the work was disregarded. It is scored for a string
quartet and two different sized string orchestras. If, as in
tonight’s performance, these orchestras aren’t physically
separated from each other, the composer’s antiphonal effects are
weakened or lost. Although we heard a fine performance,
skillfully paced and shaped by conductor Christian Colberg, it
was one which didn’t express a crucial part of the composer’s
intent.
A performance
of Dvorak’s Serenade for Strings in E major, Opus 22 exhibited
the same fine intonation and tight ensemble we heard all
evening. But here the echoey acoustics got in the way and
created muddy textures. The concert ended with a spirited
performance of Jose Ignacio Quinton’s Puerto Rican dance, “El
Coqui.”
-Harry Saltzman;
New York
Concert Review; New York, NY
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