YOUTHFUL ORCHESTRA, PIANIST AND BEETHOVEN MEET IN HEALDSBURG CONCERTS

An inaugural concert of the Philharmonia Healdsburg at Healdsburg’s Raven Theater brought out a full house for concerts on a rainy weekend June 4 and 5. Comments were heard that the new orchestra might be the Santa Rosa Symphony North.

The new orchestra is composed of many players from Santa Rosa, Napa, Ukiah, Symphony of the Redwoods as well as several players from the San Francisco Symphony. Under the Direction of Les Pfutzenreuter, currently on the faculty of Performing Arts at Mendocino College, this orchestra was launched with an all-Beethoven program centered around the Symphony No. 2 and the C Major Piano Concerto. Mr. Pfutzenreuter explained from the podium the programming for this concert revolved around the young Beethoven, and he was pleased to have a 20-year old soloist, Healdsburg native Lawrence Holmefjord-Sarabi.

Opening on Saturday evening with the Overture to the ballet The Creatures of Prometheus, Op. 43, the hall resounded with big chords followed by a lush string sound led by Concertmaster Philip Santos. The violins had a sweet tone, and the theater acoustics accepted with clarity the fleet tempos.

The Op. 15 Piano Concerto began at a brisk Allegro con brio, almost in two beats per measure rather than the four beats contained in the score. That tempo settled down with the melodic second theme. The Raven, an old movie hall with an extended stage and chairs lower than the orchestra, tended to have the forward sound of piano blocking the orchestra violas and the mid-level winds from reaching out distinctly to the close-up seats. Many parts of the performance of the C Major Concerto had beautiful phrasing and the energy of youth, although this reviewer wanted the oft-changing tempos to be steadier. The conductor brought the orchestra in line with the pianist’s choice of pace.

Concerning the D Major Symphony, Op. 36, Mr. Pfutzenreuter quoted in the program notes that a Viennese critic for the Zeitung fuer die elegante Welt (Newspaper for the Elegant World) famously wrote of the Symphony that it was "a hideously writhing, wounded dragon that refuses to die, but writhing in its last agonies and, in the fourth movement, bleeding to death” and hoped that this 2011 Healdsburg performance would certainly be more enjoyable than what the critic heard in 1803.

Beethoven wrote famously lengthy slow movements and here the bucolic Larghetto was played languorously with Mr. Pfutzenreuter’s attention to melodic line and rhythmic complexities everywhere apparent.

Summing up the initial outing of the Healdsburg Philharmonia: where else can you sit and have a glass of wine in the comfortable cushioned seats of a former movie theater and listen to a high-quality Beethoven performance?