“Music in Motion,” Berkeley Symphony’s concert on Sunday, Feb. 9, featured dance-inspired works from three centuries. Rhythmically energized music by Beethoven, John Adams, and Anna Clyne motivated the spirit as much as it moved bodies.
Dancers were spinning and leaping in front of Music Director Joseph Young and the orchestra on the newly refurbished stage of the Berkeley Community Theater. The concert’s centerpiece, Clyne’s 2019 cello concerto DANCE, brought to the fore a dozen performers from Berkeley Ballet Theater’s preprofessional Studio Company. Choreographers Robin Dekkers and Miche Wong conjured an embodiment of the freedom, conflict, and yearning of Rumi’s poetry, which provides the concerto’s five-movement architecture.
Cellist Inbal Segev was center stage, with the accompanying orchestra at the back, somewhat recessed by its distance from the audience. The artistic consequence of this arrangement shifted the thrust of Clyne’s ingenious take on Rumi away from the inward struggle for freedom that animates the score and put the focus instead on the overwhelming tumult the poet describes. Rumi’s work, in its spiritual leaps, is nothing if not a balance of contradictions.
Wong may have been the featured solo dancer, but the choreography did not simply recreate the music’s division between soloist and accompaniment. The ensemble instead churned through groupings and shifting solos, the dancing culminating in an astonishing final lift — as I think Rumi would have it. The vitality was overflowing, even in this poised performance. Indeed, Wong and Dekkers created a bustling parallel world to the singular musical flow of Clyne’s concerto.
Lighting added to the performance’s positively overwhelming effect. A spotlight set Segev’s varnished instrument aglow, while other lights at the sides of the stage cast a kaleidoscope of spinning, meshing, and reaching shadows.
Segev’s commanding performance was generously emotive — endlessly brooding and drawing on a range of tonal colors. Young’s orchestra provided supple accompaniment. Rumi’s spare five-stanza meditation on the inner resources of human freedom and faith seemed to fit Segev’s soloist spirit perfectly. Her ruminative presence left plenty of room for choreography stirring up the poet’s challenging stanzas of violence, torment, and physical release.
The concert’s opener, Adams’s toe-tapping The Chairman Dances (Foxtrot for Orchestra), excellently set up the theme of sound restlessly in motion. This dance is straightforwardly physical and philosophically blank (stripped of its association with Adams’ opera Nixon in China).
Not until the last piece on the program, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, did the balance between motion and meditation achieve truly Rumi-esque levels of ambiguity.
This symphony certainly has all the rhythmic simplicity and repetition of ballet, but its second-movement Allegretto is also meditation par excellence. The powerful undercurrent of dance is subsumed in a cosmically expansive four-movement arc. Young was closely attuned to the work’s many moments of anticipation and then release into unbridled physicality. He led a patient, purposeful, and deft performance that was also surprisingly light. Dynamics were varied and graded carefully, and balances were clear. That said, Beethoven’s interjections of power were sometimes blunted because of how the orchestra was packed into the acoustic shell at the back of the stage.
Young enthusiastically swayed and rocked on the podium, yet no more dance was needed. The orchestra projected patiently sustained lines with smooth warmth in the first movement. Careful textures and attacks powered up the bumptious scherzo, and the finale was soaring, exhilarating — that lift presaged earlier in the concert. Berkeley Symphony’s Beethoven was musical motion writ large.
