Seattle is lucky enough to boast two Baroque orchestras: Seattle Baroque Orchestra and the Pacific MusicWorks Orchestra. The latter group has until now been used by Pacific MusicWorks in period-style opera and oratorio performances. Last weekend, for the first time, the orchestra performed alone in its own right, giving four all-Vivaldi performances around town.
Artistic director Stephen Stubbs chose to share out the many concerto solos among different orchestra members to, as he comments in the notes, “emphasize the idea of an orchestra of soloists” rather than an amorphous bunch of orchestra musicians.
The performance Friday night at Edmonds United Methodist Church began with Vivaldi’s string concerto in C, RV 114, for all 14 players of the orchestra, played with plenty of spirit and nice contrast between legato and crisp articulated sections, plus a beautiful harpsichord bridge to the last movement played by Henry Lebedinsky. Next came the very familiar group of concertos titled collectively “The Four Seasons,” with violin soloists Adam Lamotte (“Spring”), Chloe Myers (“Summer”), Carla Moore (“Fall”) and concertmaster Tekla Cunningham (“Winter”).
A rare performance of the Concerto for Lute and Viola d’amore, RV 540, showcased Stubbs and Cunningham and the timbres of their instruments which we don’t often hear in solo mode. The six-stringed viola d’amore has a sound both very soft and pure, a good match of the equally soft lute, while the orchestra only burst forth more loudly where the soloists were silent.
However, the most stunning performance of the evening came in the Concerto for two cellos in G Minor, RV 531. Cellists Elisabeth Reed and Beilang Zhu gave virtuoso performances—rich, expressive and full of verve—in this unusual, exciting and often tempestuous work. The concerto must have startled the daylights out of first-time listeners, who were not used to cellists playing solo, let alone in something so technically showy.
The four “Seasons” concertos were more uneven in execution due to the different soloists. All four played with vivid portrayals of this early descriptive work, and it was a fine idea to have the four poems on which it is based read before each concerto, as it was also to have in Stubbs’ notes the actual delineation of what is being musically described when.
While softer sections with long serene lines from all the soloists came over well, Myers had some brief intonation problems, and Moore went beyond vigor to what felt a bit too strained in her approach to faster, more virtuosic sections. Lamotte did an excellent job with “Spring,” but in “Winter,” as played by Cunningham, one could almost feel the chattering teeth in the first movement, the contrast to warmth and comfort in the cozy second, and ice in the last. Despite its virtuosic content, Cunningham made the performance feel perfectly easy, all the intention being on the picture she conjured up before our ears.