Music review: Michael Stern makes impressive Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra debut

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s program at the Alex Theatre on Saturday night was called “Spotlight on LACO,” a family affair. Concertos by Copland and Schumann featured the ensemble’s principal players. But music director Jeffrey Kahane, sidelined by mononucleosis and infectious hepatitis, was replaced by Michael Stern, and the spot was redirected.

Born in 1959 and in his sixth season as music director of the Kansas City Symphony, Stern is little known in Los Angeles. As a student, he participated in Leonard Bernstein’s Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute in the early '80s and more recently conducted the student Colburn Orchestra. For what it’s worth (quite a bit, in fact), he is Isaac Stern’s son. He gets around: He has had chief-conductor and principal and permanent guest-conductor gigs in Germany and France; he founded the IRIS Orchestra in Germantown, Tenn.

More importantly, Stern gets around musically. Unlike any local maestros, he has championed California’s first great composer, Henry Cowell. Had Saturday’s clarinet concerto been L.A. composer Stephen Hartke’s rather than Copland’s, that would have been fine; Stern has recorded it. His recent recording of oboe concertos by the neglected Italian modernist Bruno Maderna is worth rushing out to buy if you can find it.

So it came as little surprise that Stern happened to know all the music on Kahane’s varied program, including Osvaldo Golijov’s tango-inspired “Last Round”; Hugo Wolf’s “Italian Serenade”; and “Mozart’s Hymn,” by Daniel Kellogg, a young composer who teaches at the University of Colorado. Stern even has a Kellogg commission for his Kansas City band in the works.

Stern brings the young Zubin Mehta to mind. He has a dynamic stick technique that commands rather than coaxes. Attacks are sharp and aggressive. Rhythms are clean and propulsive. He knows his way to a climax.

Kellogg’s nine-minute Mozart mix for strings (the violins and violas played standing) is a rapturous -- maybe a little too rapturous -- stringing of tremulous high-string prettiness, sweet harmonies and gossamer textures like Christmas lights around Mozart’s transcendent “Ave Verum Corpus.” The ending was sentimental. This is music with a pretty face, and that should have been enough.

The concert moved backward in history. “Mozart’s Hymn” dates from 2006. Golijov’s “Last Round,” for two string quartets and bass, was written a decade earlier. There is a tango fight and more rapture but also more pathos and less refined sugar. Stern took a tough, tango-means-business-in-Buenos-Aires-back-alleys approach, and it was gripping.

Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, with LACO principal clarinetist Joshua Ranz as the edgy, exciting soloist, was also unusually hard-edged for a work tailored to Benny Goodman. A slow pastoral beginning, strings and harp backing maybe the mellowest clarinet melody since Mozart, leads to swing.

Perhaps Stern merely followed Ranz’s lead, turning the concerto into so sprightly a virtuoso vehicle (Goodman was more casual). But Stern’s father, after recording Copland’s equally restrained Violin Sonata with the composer as pianist, tried unsuccessfully to talk Copland into writing a livelier concerto for violin -– something maybe closer to Saturday's approach to the Clarinet Concerto.

In the second half, Wolf’s short, insignificant serenade was prelude to Schumann’s long, too significant Cello Concerto with Andrew Shulman as soloist. Shulman joined LACO after an unhappy trial year as principal cellist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where there was said to have been personality problems between him and the cello section.

A big ego, however, is handy for this concerto, a late work that shows signs of Schumann’s decline. The performance was technically and musically capable, but I sensed little chemistry between soloist and conductor; the performance sagged as performances of the concerto often do.

This was probably a job for Kahane. But there is also a job for Stern hereabouts. He is someone we should be seeing more of.  

-- Mark Swed

Photo: Andrew Shulman is soloist in Schumann's Cello Concerto with Michael Stern conducting the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra at the Alex Theatre on Dec. 11, 2010. Credit: Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times

Comments

[Michael Noguera]

Bravo, Stern! We in Kansas City are lucky to have such a champion for music leading our Symphony

[Andrew Duckles]

As a musician, I always find it incredible how much different things feel on stage as opposed to what the audience experiences. I read this review yesterday and was perplexed, confused by it. My impression of the concert was quite a bit different!

[Anonymous musician living in fear of the Dark Lord Swed's reprisals but still able to make witty, ironic comments...]

Excellent Review!

[Aaron Scott]

I am puzzled by the perplexed confusion alluded to by Mr. Duckles, who apparently was on stage playing (I looked on the web to verify his membership in LACO's viola section). When he questions the review, he can't have been referring to the contributions of either the orchestra or the conductor. The former, with a few minor mishaps, was excellent, as was the clarinet soloist Mr. Ranz. And the conductor, Michael Stern, was even better than that. Could it be that Mr. Duckles was experiencing something other than we did in the audience during the Schumann concerto? I very much enjoyed the concert, and witnessed the same enthusiasm in the sizeable audience around me, except after the last work in the program, which was an embarrassment. I agree with Mr. Swed's review (not always the case, to be sure). My only disagreement would be in the reviewer's assessment of why the Schumann performance was so unsatisfactory. It appeared that the conductor was trying hard to have some connection with the soloist. When he took over the orchestral tuttis, it seemed to me that he might have even gone a little too far in trying to generate some heat, overcompensating a touch for the complete absence of any understanding on the soloist's part as to Schumann's fire and passion. Whenever the soloist returned to the dialogue, throughout, the tempo slowed down alarmingly to a crawl, and the pulse of the solo line becamse anyone's guess. Because of that musical inadequacy on Mr. Shulman's part – mistaking self-indulgence for musicality –combined with his obvious technical struggles to master the piece, the Schumann died on the vine. But do not blame the composer, the concerto is a masterpiece!

[Graham Ferguson]

I too was perplexed when I read this review. I attended this concert and enjoyed all of it, including the Schumann. I don't know where Mr. Scott was sitting, but around me there was nothing but applause and excitement after the performance. I thought the cello sounded beautiful and I loved the concerto. I was interested in Mark Swed's remarks about Andrew Shulman and did a little investigation. I found some other reviews posted on his website page at http://www.andrewshulman.com/reviewspage.html many written by Swed himself. Perhaps he knows him personally to make such personal remarks in a music review, but it still seems strange to talk about a musician in this way.