Last night’s concert at the Trenton State Museum with Daniel Spalding’s other group, the Philadelphia Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra, flowed naturally from his last as music director of the Capital Philharmonic of New Jersey. That program, which was presented at the historic Roebling Machine Shop in April, with George Antheil’s raucous “Ballet Mécanique” as its centerpiece, was a literal circus, employing acrobats and jugglers of Trenton Circus Squad to divert while the various configurations of percussion instruments were set. There were also musical interludes featuring the Plenty Pepper Steel Band and Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” played on the marimba by Greg Giannascoli.
Last night’s program similarly unfolded as a kind of vaudeville, with its disparate elements flowing one into another. The overarching theme was one of a gastronomical nature, with Lee Hoiby’s “comic culinary extravaganza” (really, a 20-minute chamber opera about Julia Child) “Bon Appétit!,” the main course. Composed in 1982, this is a work that seems to have really gained traction since the pandemic, since it requires only one singer (no need to social distance), often supported by a pianist (inexpensive).
Last night was the first time I heard it with a chamber orchestra of ten players, and unquestionably it enhanced the enjoyment to have the additional musical colors. Hoiby, who studied with Gian Carlo Menotti at the Curtis Institute of Music, has always been celebrated for his songs. I am unfamiliar with his other operas, but this one was Straussian (late Straussian) in its intimacy and word-painting. There are no arias. It is through-sung, with a libretto essentially compiled from two transcripts of Child’s popular public television program, “The French Chef,” most of it lifted from an episode devoted to the creation of L’Éminence Brune, a classic French chocolate cake.
Mezzo-soprano Christine Meadows, who’s performed the work quite a lot, was a convincing Child, convivial, high on life, and fast and loose in the kitchen. She pauses as she mixes chocolate icing to put the spatula in her mouth. She ignores a proffered clean replacement and keeps right on stirring. In the few moments when she actually gets to speak, Meadows has got the voice spot-on. Her singing is certainly much more ingratiating than that of Jean Stapleton, for whom the work was written (and no doubt compensated for by her stage presence). At the end, the cake completed, Meadows cuts a slice and hands it with a fork to a member of the audience. (A chocolate cake reception followed).
Gabriela Imreh, who is married to Spalding and last night served as creative director, had some amusing business (including having a bowl of flour dumped over her head) in a silent role as Child’s producer. (She’s the one who offers the clean spatula.)
If the chamber orchestra in “Bon Appétit!” was an unexpected luxury (I didn’t even know this version existed), things were stripped to the bone for the opening piece, Camille Saint-Saëns’ “The Wedding Cake,” a valse-caprice for piano and string orchestra. Strings were cut back to one per part – so essentially it was made into a piano quintet. Artem Tenkeli was the pianist, who played on a battered instrument that presumably belonged to the museum. I must say, I missed the full body of strings. This was followed by two solo piano works, an etude by Chopin nicknamed “The Honey Bee” and Scott Joplin’s “Pineapple Rag.” Curiously, although the pianist had “The Wedding Cake,” the most substantial and perhaps the rarest of the three pieces, committed to memory, he played the Joplin from sheet music.
More absorbing was Bohuslav Martinu’s “La revue de cuisine,” a 1920s ballet marked by dance rhythms and jazz inflections. The original scenario explored romantic entanglements among the kitchen utensils, but Spalding, in some spoken remarks, dismissed this as “dumb,” so he and Imreh concocted a new story that lacked anywhere near the kind of zany invention Martinu had in mind.
Dancers Ruth Hernandez and Anton Domansky enacted the early stages of a romantic dinner in an intimate restaurant, backlit, behind a screen. (Amusingly the musicians were all dressed in chef jackets and Spalding entered with a towel over his arm.) The pantomimed conversation turns contentious and devolves into a quarrel. The couple emerges from behind the screen for (presumably) two fantasy sequences, the first a sultry tango (Hernandez’s field of expertise) and the second a Charleston (complete with feathered headband and scarlet fringe dress). Parenthetically, the Charleston, which became the anthem of the 1920s, was composed by James P. Johnson, born about thirty minutes up Route 1, in New Brunswick, NJ.
In the end, the dancers are back behind the screen, the lovers’ quarrel is resolved, and they step out once more onto the stage for Domansky to take a knee in the time-honored position of proposal. Hernandez accepts.
Sure, the scenario was trite (lacking the surreal spectacle of amorous pots and pans) but the dancers were clearly expert. More importantly, from a performance standpoint, the musicians did full justice to Martinu’s music, which is both pleasingly witty and propulsively neoclassical.
In between the major numbers of this thoughtfully-constructed program, in which every component related in some way to food, were palate-cleansers, I suppose, in the form of totally unrelated Latin guitar music, performed by David Galvez. Galvez was the soloist when Spalding programmed Joaquin Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez” with the Capital Philharmonic last season. He is a superb guitarist. It would be churlish of me to wonder what his presence had to do with food. Perhaps Saturday night is Spanish guitar night at the local romantic restaurant.
The concert was about 90 minutes in length, performed without intermission. The time passed agreeably. At no point did any of its disparate elements seem to outstay its welcome, with the Martinu, Hoiby, and guitar interludes highlights. Spalding pitched the idea of a regular series in Trenton. We’ll see if he continues with this kind of free-association-on-a-theme approach to concert programming.
Spalding’s tenure with the Capital Phil, an orchestra he founded, spanned ten seasons. He founded the Philadelphia Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra in 1991. The ensemble has recorded a number of CDs for the Naxos, New World, Arabesque, and Connoisseur Classics labels, including an acclaimed disc featuring Antheil’s “Ballet Mécanique” that was recorded at the Trenton War Memorial.
For more information about the group, visit http://www.pvco.org.
Bon appétit!
PHOTO: Christine Meadows as Julia Child from another production
