I was terribly disappointed last night at CORE Performance Company’s ‘a world too wide’ at the Rialto Center for the Arts. The piece was danced to live accompaniment by a baroque orchestra from Houston called Mercury. The concertmaster was so bad that I was actually embarrassed for the orchestra. I felt even worse seeing the second violin cringing at the concertmaster’s mistakes over and over again. I have no idea if the mike was causing some of the problems, but a lot of that was just poor performance and possible poor instrument maintenance — some of that creaking sound was probably due to rosin buildup on the strings of the violin. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the concertmaster; the violinist most down stage left had no idea how to handle his bow and one or two people needed to learn the music a little better so that they could peek up at the conductor more often and stay with the ensemble. And could anyone even hear the theorbo? Why would you have only one theorbo in that large of a violin string orchestra? For that matter, why would you have a theorbo in that large of a space? It’s a very quiet instrument. We have two perfectly good baroque orchestras in Atlanta but Schroeder wanted to bring these guys in all the way from Houston?
Continue reading →