Wonder and revolt

The classical season does not go softly into summer

By Doug Hubley

Portland Symphony Orchestra, Mozart & More Series, at 2:30 p.m., April 22. Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, presented by PCA Great Performances, at 7:30 p.m., April 26. Portland Symphony Orchestra, Classical Series, at 7:30 p.m., May 8. All concerts at Merrill Auditorium. Call (207) 842-0800.

LAID BARE: Heidi Murphy sings two pieces without the benefit of words, with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

What with summer coming and all, you might expect the last music of the regular classical season to kick its shoes off and waltz you through the wildflowers. And for sure, the Portland Symphony Orchestra does have something suitable in store for its final Mozart & More series on Sunday: a buoyant and easygoing program whose charms include teen violin prodigy Sandy Cameron.

But the picnic in the park will have to wait for summer proper, because both the PSO and PCA Great Performances are wrapping up their seasons with surprising gravity. On April 26, PCA presents the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a handful of top New York musicians with an intriguing batch of compositions. The highlight is 1983’s To a Child Dancing in the Wind, a setting of Yeats poetry by the English musical spiritualist John Tavener.

On May 8, the PSO ends its Classical Series with a blockbuster. Leading off is the Hebrides Overture (Fingal’s Cave), Mendelssohn’s vivid nature painting. Principal French hornist John Boden is featured in Richard Strauss’ Horn Concerto No. 2, a seldom-heard work that melds “Mozartean” form with Strauss’ distinctive bold sense of color and harmony. A curious but impressive choice concludes the concert and the PSO season: Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11, the anguished commemoration of a bloody protest in Czarist Russia. Happy spring, everybody!

For sheer news value, the Mozart & More show leads the list, thanks to 14-year-old Sandra Wolf-Meei Cameron. Where other musicians’ audiences just applaud, Cameron’s need to pick up their jaws first. Those stunned beholders have included her teacher, Lewis Kaplan, a Juilliard faculty member and artistic director for our own Bowdoin Summer Music Festival; and Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, who has invited Cameron to perform with him twice this summer, once at the hoity-toity Salzburg Music Festival and once at Gergiev’s White Nights Festival, a major do in St. Petersburg.

Maine has heard Cameron before. Kaplan presented her at Bowdoin in 1998, where she played part of the Mozart concerto slated for Sunday, and 1999. He likens her talent to that of his former students Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax. It’s a combination of sheer technical ability, voracious musical appetite, and a precocious grasp of the thoughts that underlie the music. “I have never seen this kind of insight from such a young person,” Kaplan says. “It’s absolutely incredible.” Cameron inspires reviewers to swoon and music managers to give her work — she just signed with the prestigious agency Columbia Artists Management, and has orchestral bookings next season in Seattle, Liverpool, and Magdeburg, Germany.

All this from a girl who is too shy to talk to the press, who perched a doll on her fiddle for her publicity photos, and who added “Wolf” to her name because she loves wolves. She’s the only child of Michael Cameron, a lawyer for the U.S. Justice Department, and Sammeei Cameron, a Korean native who runs their household in Poolesville, Maryland. Neither with musical backgrounds, her parents were taken aback when Sandy’s ability reared its head at age 8, but they’ve recovered nicely. “We’re all in a new adventure,” her mother says, one that combines onstage triumphs with a 3 a.m. departure for New York and Juilliard every Saturday. “We are with her, and we like to support her as much as we can.”

Cameron and the PSO will play Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 4 in D Major (K. 218), one of five the then-youthful composer penned, possibly for his own performance, in the early 1770s. Cameron wowed Gergiev with her reading of a thorny Prokofiev concerto, Kaplan says, but she also understands Mozart’s singing lyricism, and her performance “will be a delightful mix of this operatic style and the young virtuoso.”

The program opens with works by two 20th-century French composers — Jacques Ibert’s Hommage à Mozart and Arthur Honegger’s homage to summer, the impressionistic Pastorale d’été (“Summer Pastoral”). Rounding out the program is Haydn’s late Symphony No. 103 in E-Flat Major (“Drumroll”), which does a lot with Croatian folk tunes and is nicknamed for a timpani figure that frames the first movement. (The PSO also brings the program to Rockland District High School at 7:30 p.m. Saturday.)

Four days later, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center sends four of its 19 resident musicians and one guest artist, soprano Heidi Grant Murphy, to Merrill Auditorium. Founded in 1969, this unusual organization is a musical repertory company whose high-powered resident and guest musicians are mixed and matched for a nifty variety of projects. Coming north for PCA, along with Murphy, are veteran harpist Heidi Lehwalder, violinist Ida Kavafian, flutist Ransom Wilson and violist Paul Neubauer, familiar as a Prairie Home Companion guest.

The society’s all-star set-up gives it a certain edge. The players all have other projects, and so there’s not the kind of old-married intimacy that more monogamous ensembles may have. “We just meet at the hall before the show, and that’s where we see each other,” Murphy laughs. But “they’re just really good, high-level players, and that makes it fabulous,” adds Murphy — herself no slob, being a regular performer with the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and international organizations of like caliber.

The program is divided between two purely instrumental works and two with Murphy. The former are Beethoven’s early Serenade for Flute, Violin and Viola in D major (Op. 25) and Debussy’s Baroque-flavored Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp, written in 1917.

Murphy appears for the Tavener piece and a 1924 work by Heitor Villa-Lobos, the Suite for Voice and Violin. Steeped even more heavily than usual in the folk music of Villa-Lobos’ native Brazil, the suite consists of three songs, of which two are wordless – pure vocalise.

John Tavener’s To a Child Dancing in the Wind, on the other hand, is very much about words. Not to be confused with 16th-century composer John Taverner, Tavener is considered (and considers himself) one of the key mysticists of contemporary music, a builder of spare and transcendent soundscapes. He chose nine texts by Irish poet and fellow mystic William Butler Yeats to narrate a stroll down the path of life accompanied by flute, viola, and harp.

The piece hits home with her, Murphy says. “Basically, through the text, this person is sort of laid bare,” she says. “This piece is pretty immediate for me.” The denouement is “The Countless Cathleen in Paradise,” which ends with a folky sort of chant that Murphy delivers as she walks away, exiting the stage while the narrative action exits this life. “It’s very ethereal and kind of mysterious,” she says. “It’s a beautiful, beautiful ending.”

Finally, the PSO checks off another season with a lope and then a sprint to the finish. On the 28th and 29th, a Pops Series concert has PSO Music Director-Conductor Toshi Shimada and band sharing the bill with a New Orleans jazz outfit. That’s the lope. The sprint is the May 8 classical concert, thanks to some tough music and a compressed rehearsal schedule.

Bracketing the Strauss concerto are the Mendelssohn Hebrides overture and the Shostakovich symphony. The former was inspired by a dramatic sea-carved cave on a Scottish island, which the composer visited when he was 20. Like everyone else who sees Fingal’s Cave, he was wowed, and the result is considered one of the most pictorially evocative works in the repertoire.

The Shostakovich is evocative in a much different way. Composed in 1957, it is based on the 1905 citizens’ protest in St. Petersburg that was cruelly repressed by the Czar’s police and that prefigured the Russian Revolution. Drawing on revolutionary and workers’ songs of the period, it depicts in wrenching terms the massacre and its aftermath. It’s believed that the composer, working under the Soviet regime, was also quietly commenting on the Hungarian uprising of 1956 that was likewise brutally crushed by state forces.

It’s John Boden’s first time for Richard Strauss’s Horn Concerto No. 2. “Mozartean” is the word usually applied to the formal underpinnings of the piece, although the harmonic language is late-Romantic. The composer’s father was a horn virtuoso and his understanding for the instrument rubbed off on Richard. Written when Strauss was 78, the concerto is no piece of cake — it’s “very notey,” Boden notes — but there’s nothing that fights the logic of the instrument. “It’s just a small bad dream,” Boden laughs. “Actually, it’s a great dream.” And so on to summer.

Doug Hubley can be reched at doug.hubley@worldnet.att.net