Galways' music powerful beyond words

By Ruth Bingham
Special to The Advertiser

Great music is not a genre, like classical, jazz, or rock. It isn't even a piece of music: Paper is simply a way of preserving and disseminating music, and even wonderful pieces can be destroyed if played badly.

Great music lies in the intangibles of performance, and notes are only music when they live.

On Friday night, the Honolulu Symphony and featured flutists Sir James and Lady Jeanne Galway created an evening of great music — an evening that included a traditional folk tune, several popular works and lesser-known Classical pieces in addition to a de rigueur masterwork.

The evening began with the masterwork: Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony, a work perfectly balanced between the Classical and Romantic worlds. It is a sunny piece, full of youthful exuberance and technical challenges for the orchestra.

Maestro Samuel Wong gave it a warm, very musical reading, more lush than classical, more tailored than Romantic, and the orchestra delivered an exceptional performance.

Mendelssohn made a short but powerful first half, but that was quickly eclipsed in the second half by the Galways.

The Galways opened with Cimarosa's concerto for two flutes, using a pared-down orchestra of fewer than 30 musicians, which highlighted the flutes' timbres and afforded them room to maneuver dynamically.

Their timbres both complemented and contrasted. Sir James has a lighter, silver-toned, pure sound that is tightly focused and almost airless; Lady Jeanne's sound is warmer, broader and more diffuse.

Lady Jeanne proved to be a fine musician in her own right, although perhaps inevitably overshadowed by her husband. Sir James is a strong-willed performer and tended to go his own way, Lady Jeanne deftly following his every move.

Their encore, an arrangement of Mozart's "Alla Turca" (Turkish) rondo from Piano Sonata in A (K.331), turned out to be even better in some ways than the original. It included a "Turkish trio" of triangle, cymbal and bass drum, and was varied with the kind of figuration only flutes can muster.

The entire latter part of the concert featured a solo by Sir James, beginning with Mercadante's Flute Concerto, and ending with five encores, including four Henry Mancini favorites.

An incomparable musician with a delightful sense of humor and charming Irish accent, Sir James astonished the audience one moment and moved them to tears the next.

There is no point in describing his performance: Neither description nor recording can approach what happens live.

Does it help to know that he played with astonishing ease, the movement of his fingers barely visible, that his tone was even throughout, his intonation exact, his vibrato carefully controlled?

Those are details entirely beside the point. However marvelous his technique, his playing is founded in expression. He knows how to caress a note, to sculpt a phrase, so that it illuminates new possibilities.

When he eased into the recapitulation of the second theme in the first movement of the Mercadante, for example, the audience gasped in surprise.

Sir James closed the evening with a haunting, deeply moving rendition of the traditional Irish tune "Danny Boy," which Sir James described as "a prayer in music." It is a prayer that echoed long after leaving the concert hall.