Beethoven at San Domenico / San Anselmo, 10 February

The worst moment of the concert, a brief cacophony in the middle of
Beethoven's Grosse Fuge in B-flat, served as a reality check, putting the
whole experience in perspective.  At your average high-school concert, such
things happen all the time - yes, Mr. Holland.  But here, in San Domenico
School's Music Pavilion, bad notes are the exception.  In two decades of
the school's amazing tributes to Vivaldi, I seldom heard bad intonation,
missed notes.  This program operates on a higher level; it has produced -
outside the setting of a music school - a score of musicians who are now
members of major orchestras or are engaged in solo careers.

Faith France's Virtuoso Program, now under George Thomson's direction,
is neither the usual music-school curriculum nor an "enrichment project"
for high-school students.  It is based on a unique - and singularly
successful - idea to provide the challenge, the discipline, the opportunity
of chamber-music performances to teenagers.  Over the years, the Virtuoso
Program helped raise young people following various professions, but in the
possession of musical skills, as well as professional musicans on the order
of Hai-Ye Ni, Karen Shinozaki, Robin Creighton, Jessica Lin, Lin Tung, many
others.

As so many events here before, Sunday's Orchestra da Camera concert also
produced some brilliantly promising performances by San Domenico's young
citizen-musicians.  Sixteen-year-old Jannie Lo was the soloist in the first
movement of Beethoven's Second Piano Concerto, and her contemporary, Jihyun
Yun, soloed in the first movement of Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole.  In the
wonderfully democratic, hard-working ways of this school, both participated
in the entire program, returning to their respective seats in the
orchestra, fully engaged, when not up front in the limelight.

Lo, now the pianist for the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra,
plays the violin and viola in the orchestra.  The string experience was
clearly audible in her performance in the piano concerto - she played long
lines, full phrases, not individual notes.  Her approach to the music was
confident, straightforward, unsentimental but lyrical in a deeply felt way.
In the cadenza, Lo exhibited two characteristics that seldom go together:
virtuosity and a kind of humility as she let the music come through,
instead of standing between the instrument and the audience.

Yun ripped into the Lalo concerto (what this "symphonie" really is),
with vigor and strength, surprising boldness, the more remarkable as her
instrument was barely adequate for the task.  And still, Yun maintained
tempo and tone, even while high notes vibrated excessively in the violin -
an impressive performance.

The concert opened with an orchestral version of the finale from
Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 59, No. 3, a work hard enough for four
musicians, but more demanding for a chamber-orchestra of 20 strings, a
clarinet (Samantha LaValley) and a flute (Kateri Chambers).  Thomson,
responsible for orchestration, conducted the entire program, maintaining
simple and effective control over his young charges.  The opening and
closing of the Grosse Fuge were very well played, but perhaps the goals
for the concert were set too high.  The soloists and the orchestra in the
two concertos (especially in the Lalo) performed on the level of a small
professional orchestra, but in the two quartet transcriptions, there were
instances of harsh reality intruding on the magic of San Domenico's
youthful talent.

Janos Gereben/SF
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