SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Mozart, Bruch, Vaughan Williams, Beethoven, and Brahms: Stephen Bryant and Rachael Pearson, violins, John Scanlon and Sue Jane Bryant, violas, Richard Treat, cello, The Island Gallery, Bainbridge Island, WA, 25.4.2008 (BJ)


A new work by Beethoven must undoubtedly count as a treat. “New to me,” I hasten to add: I am not speaking of the curious little 23-bar piece for string quartet that was unearthed about ten years ago and premiered in London by the Eroica Quartet. No, the Fugue in D major for string quintet has been around all the time, only neither I nor, I suspect, many of my readers have ever heard it before now. Written in 1817 and published posthumously, with the opus number 137, it is not a neglected masterpiece. It cannot claim anything like the stature of the equally obscure Opus 104, the composer’s string-quintet arrangement of his C-minor Piano Trio, whose existence had escaped me until I read about it in Vikram Seth’s marvelous novel An Equal Music. But this little 3/8 Allegretto is an agreeable trifle, and the expert group of area musicians brought together by Seattle Symphony violinist Stephen Bryant played it with skill and enthusiasm.

Those qualities were indeed in evidence all through this last in a series of three chamber concerts, given before a full house of perhaps fifty people in the charming Island Gallery, on Bainbridge Island just across Puget Sound from Seattle. The program was book-ended by two of the greatest string quintets ever written, Mozart’s K. 614 in E-flat major and Brahms’s No. 2 in G major, Op. 111, which received sumptuous yet always lucid and stylistically apt performances. Before intermission, we also heard two movements from another posthumously published work, Max Bruch’s pleasantly romantic A-minor String Quintet, and Vaughan Williams was represented by his Phantasy Quintet, an attractive piece in a characteristically folk-influenced idiom completed in 1912. Like the composer’s much later A-minor Second String Quartet, it gives the viola a leading voice in the ensemble, and John Scanlon seized his opportunities eloquently.

The series was apparently a new initiative this season. On the basis of this thoroughly enjoyable concert, I certainly hope it will be continued in future years.

Bernard Jacobson

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