ARTSMONDAY: Bartosik Shines in MSO

A star shone through the clouds in Paine Hall last Saturday night during the Mozart Society Orchestra’s (MSO) annual winter concert.

More precisely, elegant guest pianist Nora I. Bartosik ’08 shone in a brilliant performance, which was more often obscured than complemented by the orchestra.

The night began with “The Unanswered Question,” a short piece by Charles Ives. Though today Ives is widely regarded as the grandfather of American classical music, his contemporaries considered his music cryptic and highly avant-garde.

For Saturday’s performance, the piece called for a bizarre arrangement of the performing forces. With no introduction, the strings began to play nebulous phrases from behind the curtain. Though they were slightly out of tune, the placement of the string instruments out of view of the audience created an enigmatic ambience that suited the composition well.

However, the successful foundation of the ambience was quickly interrupted when the solo trumpeter, the only performer on the stage, entered sloppily, spitting the notes out of an under-formed embouchure. In addition, the four flutes positioned in the balcony were sharp but slightly out of step with each other during difficult atonal passages.

Ives considered himself a transcendentalist and intended the contrast of the soothing ephemeral strings with the sharp discordant winds to create what Thoreau called “a vibration of the universal lyre.” It was an interesting idea, but at least in this performance, it did not seem that Ives vision was realized.

Following this disappointing performance of an already unsettling composition, the internationally acclaimed pianist Bartosik took the stage to perform Beethoven’s “Piano Concerto No. 3.” The introduction performed by the orchestra suggested the second performance would be no better than the first. Although the strings section played in unison and followed the concertmaster well, the winds seemed to be in an entirely different world. Constantly out of sync, the two sections did not seem to share any musical connection.

However, the clouds drifted to the sides for a moment to spotlight the calm, confident Bartosik. Her entrance into the program flowed perfectly, as the musical focus transitioned from the orchestra to the piano. She mimicked many of the themes presented by the strings by adding new ornamentation.

Audience members could not help but be particularly struck by Bartosik’s composure. She often played a difficult run or trill with one hand while resting the other calmly on her lap. Her cadenza and display of virtuosity at the end of the first movement was brilliant and unquestionably qualified as the moment of the most laudable musicality of the night.

Bartosik has an intuitive sense of which points in a piece require slowing down and which require speeding up, and as a result she expertly transitioned between loud and soft. As her body swayed gently back and forth with the music, the audience could feel the grace of Beethoven’s composition consume her. Nonetheless, there were sections of the piece that seemed to call for more aggression than she was able to muster.

With the strings section continually out of sync, the second movement was particularly poor due to the orchestra’s part. Bartosik’s performance, however, continued to entertain and was as tender and graceful as ever. The overwhelming contrast between the soloist and the accompaniment left at least one audience member wishing the orchestra would put their instruments down and let the soloist perform unimpeded.

Since the program listed the orchestra as performing the third piece of the evening (Schumann’s “Symphony No. 3”) without Bartosik, audience members might have expected disaster, but the orchestra seemed to have improved their performance level significantly by the time they played this piece. The opening was strong and bold, and despite a few errors in both the strings and winds, the orchestra remained together and on key through most of the symphony.

—Reviewer Jonathan M. Hanover can be reached at jhanover@fas.harvard.edu.