By Lawrence Toppman
Not one composer known to the average classical music fan has ever published a concerto for double bass, unless you count Oscar-winning film scorers Nino Rota and Tan Dun. So virtuosi such as Edgar Meyer must dig up pieces from the unremembered past or write one themselves.
Meyer has done both, and the results reached Knight Theater last weekend between Jennifer Higdon’s “blue cathedral” and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8. I’d wager that most patrons remember what he played – Giovanni Bottesini’s Concerto No. 2 and his own Concerto in D – less than how he played, with an assurance and tender intensity that marks a master of the instrument.
Soft tones sighed. Loud ones rumbled. High notes spun spiderwebs of melody. Low ones made you think that, if the Earth itself could hum, it would sound like this. Meyer had the knack of making his own non-virtuosic concerto interesting and Bottesini’s virtuosic one sound more intimate and profound than it is.
And when he joined violinist son George Meyer on the encore “Big Sciota,” a tune named for an Ohio river, he proved equally adept at bluegrass music. (Both father and son go back and forth easily between these two worlds.) I would willingly have listened to another half-hour of their duets and foregone the Bottesini.
He rendered that 1853 concerto with the same tenderness and affection as he did his own, playing down the fireworks and playing up the sweetly sentimental moments. Yet I found his work, untraditional as it was, more interesting. (He titled the three movements I, II and III and identified them only by metronome markings.)
He used the same orchestration as Bottesini – strings and winds without percussion or brass – but wrote a solo part full of jazz musings and melancholy, blues-tinged interjections over mostly quiet commentary from cellos and orchestral double-basses. Even in the faster final movement, the writing remained resolutely unmelodic, but Meyer’s persuasively emotional playing held it together.
The taciturn soloist, clad in gray pants and a light blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, was quite a contrast to André Raphel. The guest conductor, born André Raphel Smith in Durham, spoke lovingly and eloquently about Higdon’s piece, written as a tribute to a younger brother who died of cancer in 1998. (Raphel has commissioned work from Higdon, who now lives in North Carolina with wife Cheryl Lawson; Lawdon Press, their joint publishing company, is in Chapel Hill.)
Blue was Andrew Higdon’s middle name, and Raphel gave this walk through a celestial cathedral a sense of yearning, uncertainty, then exultation, as Andrew’s spirit soared higher. The small touches, such as Chinese temple bells jangled by the cellists and unusual percussive effects, all registered to create a sense of holy mystery.
The Beethoven symphony, by contrast, remained earthbound. It’s a shorter, lighter and merrier entry in his symphonic canon than the Seventh and Ninth that bracket it, but Raphel conducted it as if should be classed with them. His emphatic accents and weightiness robbed it of its fleet-footed zest. Though none of it went by too slowly, and the orchestra played with vigor, Raphel was like a chef who insisted on turning angel food into pound cake.