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Ravel, Theofanidis and Brahms: Seattle Chamber Music Society, Lakeside School, North Seattle, 13.7.2009 (BJ)

The centerpiece in the program was the world premiere of a commissioned work by Christopher Theofanidis, and the customary pre-concert recital was sensibly devoted to an introduction to his Summer Verses. The two brilliant performers, violinist James Ehnes and cellist Robert deMaine, played snippets from the piece, and the 41-year-old Texas-born composer presided with a good deal of easy-going charm.

Playing for about 15 minutes, Summer Verses is clearly designed to offer a relatively undemanding listening experience, but that doesn’t preclude the exercise of considerable craft and some satisfyingly intense expressive touches in at least four of the five movements. The fourth movement, however, is a horse of another color. Titled “Robert,” it celebrates the composer’s and cellist’s 20-year friendship with a trenchant–not to say somewhat scurrilous–musical portrait.

Essentially a piece of music theater, rather like those the trombonist Stuart Dempster was pioneering as far back as the 1960s, it calls on the resourceful cellist to contribute all kinds of physical effects and vocal interjections. The ebullient deMaine obliged with evident relish, while Ehnes chugged away at his side with simple poker-faced repeated notes.

A good time was had by all. I have to say that it’s hard to imagine another cellist fitting comfortably into deMaine’s shoes, which may limit the viability of the piece for other duos–but after all, Lutoslawski’s exploitation of Rostropovich-ian musical foibles in his Cello Concerto hasn’t restricted that work’s wider dissemination. My only disappointment in the rest of Summer Verses came in the slow third movement, headed “lyric, wistful.”

Theofanidis had told us that the violin’s theme here would continue unchanged while shifting harmony beneath it altered its effect. But the change seemed to me scarcely perceptible in impact, perhaps because there was too much texture in the theme itself: Frank Martin did something similar, but to much more arresting effect, in the opening pages of his 1945 masterpiece, the Petite Symphonie concertante. Still, there were plenty of other more telling touches in Theofanidis’s new piece, and it would take more curmudgeonry than even I can muster not to respond to it with as much enjoyment as the evident enjoyment of a packed house demonstrated.

First on the program was Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Piano. As is usual in Seattle Chamber Music Society concerts, the different works on the program offered the opportunity to hear a variety of performers on the same instruments, and the Ravel was entrusted to violinist Soovin Kim and pianist Adam Neiman, who realized the full quicksilver character of the work with a performance that combined technical assurance and beguiling tone with a truly Ravelian indirectness and subtlety.

I had expected Brahms’s monumental Piano Quintet, after intermission, to be the crown of the evening. In the event, it did not quite attain that stature. There is much to be said for a dynamic rather than portentous treatment of the work’s first movement. In all four movements, moreover, there were some superbly expressive contributions from second violinist Augustin Hadelich, violist Richard O’Neill, and particularly cellist Edward Arron. The last-named, a cellist I have not heard before but certain look forward to encountering again, possesses a mighty reservoir of dark, resonant tone in the lower reaches of the instrument’s range.

Anna Polonsky is a pianist whose gifts as a chamber-music player I have had several occasions to admire in the past. So I am inclined to give her relatively faceless participation in this performance the benefit of the doubt. She may well have been collegially trying not to throw the playing of the first violinist too much in the shade. Scott St. John, it seemed to me, sacrificed everything to a shallow kind of excitement. He hacked at the quicker music rather than giving the notes time to speak, and his tone, lacking elsewhere in substance, was hardly beautiful even when, as in the potentially ravishing slow movement, it did take on some body.

As a result, this wonderful work emerged not sounding much like Brahms, and the end epitomized the rather superficial nature of the whole performance. In the breathtaking coda, insufficient care was taken with the phrasing of the helter-skelter triplet rhythms, so that the very last note came across as if it were on a heavy beat rather than as the astonishing throw-away last member in one such triplet. Nevertheless, the magnificent Ravel and the quirkily inventive Theofanidis were enough to make the evening on balance a real pleasure.

Bernard Jacobson


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