Music and Dance Reviews : English String Orchestra at the Ambassador

The prospect of hearing the English String Orchestra in its first U.S. tour, led by principal guest conductor Sir Yehudi Menuhin, may have quickened some pulses, but the results Thursday night at Ambassador Auditorium were decisively lulling. Both the program and the playing seemed purposely designed to smooth and soothe, not to stimulate.

To begin with, the ESO’s mellow, top-heavy sound--violins outnumber violas, cellos and basses combined--communicates elegance more than emotion. The bass line is subdued, almost polite; the highs have a bright, polished sheen. The effect is pleasantly lush, but it can, and often did, lack depth.

The program, too, was not marked by profundity. It began with Menuhin at the violin, ably seconded by concertmaster Michael Bochmann, in Bach’s Double Concerto. This was an old-fashioned performance with smoothed-over, harpsichordless textures and long-breathed phrasing. Menuhin’s smallish tone was often buried in the crowd, his pitch occasionally uncertain.

Holst’s carefree “St. Paul’s” Suite followed--in a jaunty, finely honed performance--and then Rossini’s Sonata No. 1 for two violins, cello and bass in a string orchestra version. A single cello and bass played the clearly soloistic passages for those instruments, but the entire violin section scampered through its virtuosic lines. The effect was odd and unbalanced.

The expansion of chamber music to orchestral proportions also served to diminish and dilute the strengths of Richard Strauss’s Prelude to “Capriccio” for sextet.

Not until the final work on the program, Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, did the orchestra plumb interpretive as well as musical depths. Here, Menuhin and orchestra gave a vigorous, impassioned reading, distinctly colored, pliantly phrased and moodily contrasted--too little, too late.