EXPO 86 : JANET BAKER ILLUMINATES VANCOUVER

Orchestras aren’t playing a particularly important role in the Expo 86 World Festival.

The biggest symphonic event, no doubt, will take place next week when Riccardo Muti brings his Philadelphians to Canada. Also on the sparse agenda are the Orchestre Symphonique of Montreal under Charles Dutoit (July) and the State Symphony of the Soviet Union under Evgeny Svetlanov (October). For the time being, however, attention is monopolized by the local band.

The local band is the Vancouver Symphony, which plays an ambitious season at its renovated movie-palace home, the Orpheum.

In recent years, the ensemble reportedly has improved its fortunes under the leadership of Kazuyoshi Akiyama. Since September, however, the music director has been Rudolf Barshai, the former conductor of the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, who emigrated to the West in 1977.

Tuesday night, Barshai led a decidedly ragged ensemble through a conventional Gluck-Mahler-Beethoven program. The main attraction, obviously, was Dame Janet Baker in her Vancouver debut.

It was a rather late debut for the great British mezzo-soprano. She doesn’t command the volume or the vocal substance these days that marked her singing in her absolute prime. Nevertheless, she remains a communicative artist of rare taste and eloquence.

In “Che faro senza Euridice” from Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice,” she projected the hero’s grief and agitation softly, with simple dignity and with an arching legato. It was impossible to tell if the snail’s pace was her preference or the conductor’s imposition, but she sustained it admirably.

In Mahler’s “Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen,” she illuminated the text with the subtlest of nuances, sustained tension with the tiniest thread of pianissimo tone, opened up for mezzo-piano climaxes that resounded in context like bona-fide fortissimos, and traced the narrative evolution from rapture to despair with poise and numbing affect.

Here, too, she had to cope with tempos that give new meaning to the term deliberate . Still, her poetic insights, her abiding sense of intimacy and her formidable breath control triumphed against the odds.

The house program, incidentally, cost nothing. Unfortunately, it also contained next to nothing. There were no texts and no translations; the historical data was skimpy, and one of the titles incomplete. Vancouver deserves better.

Barshai opened the program with a lumbering, romanticized account of the overture to Gluck’s “Alceste.” He closed it with what began as a square, plodding and out-of-tune performance of the Beethoven Seventh Symphony.

This Beethoven did seem to have a certain chamber-music clarity in its favor, not to mention dynamic restraint. It didn’t have much else in its favor.

Although Barshai did elicit suave, opulent tone from his strings, the first movement was riddled painfully with wind and brass disasters. Under the circumstances, there seemed little reason to prolong the agony.