May, 2004

Brahms, Beethoven, Borodin

Masterworks, Nakamatsu at their finest
Keith Kreitman, San Mateo County Times

As I have written before, I am convinced that, other than the entertainment centers of New York and Hollywood, the Bay Area has the greatest concentration of performing talent per square mile than any other region in the country.

The Masterworks Chorale of the College of San Mateo is one of many groups that supports my contention. The 74-voice choir and 38-instrument orchestra gets better each year, and shows no sign of slowing down in its 40th season under a new music director, Bryan Baker.

That’s not to take any credit away from the chorale’s retired founding director Galen Marshall, who guest-conducted Beethoven’s “Choral Fantasy” during the weekend at on of the season’s final concerts at the Bayside Performing Arts Center in San Mateo. Acoustics in the venue are perfect for this medium-sized combination chorus/orchestra.

In the first half of the program, the chorale demonstrated its schooled versatility. It nicely handled the 18th-century formal style of Handel’s “Coronation Anthem No. 1 (Zadok the Priest)”; the 19th-century lyrical romanticism of Brahms’ “Nanie (Op. 82),” and the oriental harmonic richness of Alexander Borodin’s spine-tingling tribute to the steppes of Central Asia, the “Polovetsian Dances.”
The second half provided a different delight: Beethoven’s 1808 “Choral Fantasy” for piano, orchestra and chorus, which featured Beethoven himself on piano at its first performance.

This is Beethoven at his best. Although the piece is looked upon as the precursor of the monumental Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 – better known as the “Choral Symphony” – I believe it is a great work that stands alone, not in the shadow of another. I had never heard it before, and have been the poorer for it.
Marshall mounted the podium and repeated with pianist Jon Nakamatsu what they had first performed together in 1994, before Nakamatsu became the gold medalist at the Van Cliburn International Piano competition in 1997.

For many people in the audience, orchestra and chorus, the performance marked the first time they heard Nakamatsu. They gasped at his artistry. I have mentioned before that the Bay Area’s Nakamatsu is one of the world’s greatest concert pianists and everyone else in the world soon would know it. Conductor Michael Tilson-Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony now do – Nakamatsu finally soloed with the orchestra last week in a Beethoven concert.
While self-effacing, modest Nakamatsu wouldn’t deliberately upstage any musical group, he couldn’t help but tower musically over even a group as brilliant as the Masterworks Chorale.

Not a key- or string-buster, Nakamatsu – either slowly or with blinding finger speed – elegantly finds the thematic core in each harmonic progression and caresses it as needed, softly or loudly.

The resulting event wasn’t just a concert. It was a piano fantasy supported by an orchestra and chorus – with participating performers in full admiration of the keyboard virtuoso. So was the audience, which wouldn’t let the pianist get away without two solo encores. They were Schubert’s “Impromptu,” Op. 90, No. 3, and Chopin’s “Fantasie Impromptu,” Op. 66 in C-sharp minor.

The performance drove home my point about the amazing concentration of talent in the Bay Area.

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