Orchestra's holiday concert is pure Christmas, complete with elves

Friday, December 12, 2003

By Peter Dobrin

INQUIRER MUSIC CRITIC

You couldn't say that not a creature was stirring Wednesday night as the Philadelphia Orchestra started five of Tchaikovsky's magnificent dances from The Nutcracker. While the orchestra played, two manic elves crept down the aisles of Verizon Hall, making silly gestures, mugging for laughs.

The music? Maybe some members of the audience were paying attention to the orchestra. But these elves weren't about to let that happen without putting up a fuss. They donned Asian straw hats in Tea, the Chinese dance, and tossed around flower cutouts in the Waltz of the Flowers. Theirs was a faux Saturday Night Live mockery of the music, a stab at irony.

It's not what we expect at the Philadelphia Orchestra. Still, it's Christmas, when even the longhairs want to let their hair down. I just wish this small part of the orchestra's Winter Wonderland concert, if it were going to take the focus off the music, had replaced it with something a little funnier.

Make no mistake, this concert, repeated this afternoon and Saturday night, does not include non-Christian traditions from around the world (or even the city). This is a pure Christmas concert, and the orchestra is magnificently at home in its traditions.

Leroy Anderson's Sleigh Ride, done as an encore, is a masterpiece of Americana, and there's nothing more delicious than a virtuoso ensemble in it, with rich strings and a hilariously braying trumpet.

This ensemble can lay ownership claims like no other to the arrangement of Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring from Cantata No. 147 in an arrangement by Lucien Cailliet (the orchestra's clarinetist and orchestrator under Stokowski, not to mention Cecil B. DeMille). The arrangement is everything. Cailliet gives the strings a wonderful feeling of freedom in their melody, the brass provide majesty, while the harp pokes through the texture with glints of white light.

The orchestra was fortunate to be joined by the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia and soprano Harolyn Blackwell, especially in Mozart's gorgeous Laudate Dominum from the Vesperae solennes de confessore (K. 339), though the Exsultate, jubilate, (K. 165) was rather dull with conductor Rossen Milanov's moderate tempo. Alan Harler led his Mendelssohnians in several short works.

The orchestra sometimes sounded underrehearsed, but it didn't matter in Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on Greensleeves, in which the Philadelphia sound dominated the music as a special sonic luxuriant.