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SINFONIETTA REVIEW: ‘Beethoven was waiting in the wings’

Those who may have seen the Lake Placid Sinfonietta for the first time last weekend picked a good night to show up.

The Saturday evening July 23 concert at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts under the direction of Stuart Malina — moved up a day because of Sunday’s Ironman Lake Placid — began with a rousing jolt of energy from Rossini with the overture to his opera “La Scala di Seta” (The Silken Ladder), a one-act comedy that premiered in 1812 and did not play again until 1954.

In between those years, the overture has remained alive and well as an orchestral favorite that features the high woodwinds and the strings galloping through the music in typical Rossinian fashion. This piece was one of his earliest commercial successes, one that he composed just two years out of his composition studies. It was his sixth opera overall.

If there is one thing a musician needs to do well in order to play Rossini, it’s play fast. He may have only known just two tempos: fast and faster. As for those expert riders on the stage, they didn’t let the music toss them from their saddles as they all kept their seats firmly in place and hung on beautifully all the way to the finish.

The next piece was in stark contrast to the first. The 58-year-old Wagner (“VOG-nuh”) wrote his “Siegfried Idyll” as a gentle wake-up call to his new 33-year-old bride, Cosima. Since her birthday was on Christmas Eve, they celebrated it on Christmas day. On that morning of 1870, he had 16 musicians slip into the house and perform it outside her bedroom door as she was waking up. By this time Cosima and her new husband, Richard (REE-kard), had already had three children together while she had still been married to pianist/conductor Hans von Bulow.

It is no secret that Wagner was not a man of exceptionally high character. Along with “sleazebag,” one could also assign the terms liar, cheat, egomaniac and shameless anti-Semite. Perhaps the character of Antonio Salieri as portrayed in the 1984 Best Picture winner “Amadeus” was onto something when he complained to God about why a pious and God-fearing man like himself should go down in history as a mere mediocrity while some rude, arrogant and unprincipled spoiled brat like Mozart should “get all the talent.”

Wagner, despite his vast array of human failings, never suffered from any lack of talent himself, and yet he didn’t make this piece an especially easy one to pull off either. The tempo is fairly slow throughout. It does have its share of beautifully written peaks and valleys of intensity, a very captivating French horn solo at about the halfway point that was played superbly by James Rester, and an overall sense of charm and grace to it that could bring to mind the fourth movement, “Adagietto,” to Mahler’s fifth symphony. But the Adagietto is about half as long at around 10 minutes and is packed with beauty and tension at the same time.

By contrast, Wagner’s wake-up call to his young bride is maybe a bit long and a mite dull. The orchestra performed this piece a few years ago, and it had the same effect, even though two very competent directors waved the batons. One could wonder if it could serve better as a lullaby instead.

But no matter. Beethoven was waiting in the wings with his “Pastoral Symphony No. 6” with which to send you home. Among those people who could not manage a smile after this piece, clones could be found of every one at the grocery store in the produce section with the rest of the vegetables.

This piece is just a sheer delight to listen to much more so live than on record. It just sounds much more busy and lively this way where the listener is liable to hear more sounds that can create more happy visions and thoughts.

Beethoven loved being in the country, as he states here in a letter dated May 1810: “How delighted I shall be to ramble for a while through bushes, woods, under trees, over grass and rocks. No one can love the country as much as I do.”

To him, the country was more than just fresh air and sunshine, and he wanted the listener to actually feel and, in a way, experience the callings of the cuckoo bird, the babbling of the brook, the folk dances of the third movement, the thunder storm of the fourth, and that inner peace achieved in the finale after the storm blows over.

He was 37 when he wrote this and had been dealing with hearing loss for more than 10 years by this time. To him the countryside could also have been a refuge saving him from depression and maybe even suicide.

Lake Placid’s “Mighty Little Orchestra That Does” truly did it again with this fantastic piece. Don’t forget: it’ll be on Sunday like normal this week for concert No. 4.

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