A variegated program of Mozart for winds and Beethoven and Strauss for piano and strings was preceded at this opening concert of the summer series’ third week by the usual pre-concert recital. This time the appetizer consisted of Poulenc’s Cello Sonata.

I found the performance, handsomely played by Robert deMaine and William Wolfram, more appetizing than the work itself. This comprises 25 minutes of as inconsequential noodling as even Poulenc ever perpetrated. The difference between art in time and art in space notwithstanding, it reminded me of E.M. Forster’s comment on a monumental column in his brilliant guidebook to Alexandria: “There is no reason that it should ever stop nor much that it should begin.”

No composer should be begrudged a little light relaxation, but relaxation ought to be backed up by at least some sense of cohesion. As it happened, the concert proper began with a piece of light music by Mozart – the second of his divertimentos for woodwind instruments, K. 439b – and the grace and structural assurance that never deserted Mozart even in his most totally relaxed moments cast a revealing retrospective light on Poulenc’s feckless superficiality. This B-flat-major Divertimento was probably intended originally for three basset horns. On this occasion, as often nowadays, it was played on two clarinets and a bassoon by Sean Osborn, Frank Kowalsky, and Seth Krimsky, and they carried it off with such skill and allure that I regretted their omission of the repeats in the da capo sections of the two minuets.

The evening then progressed to weightier matters, with Beethoven’s Piano Trio in D major, Op. 70 No. 1, before intermission, and afterwards the ambitious C-minor Piano Quartet that Strauss began when he was only nineteen and completed the following year. Returning to the platform for the Beethoven, cellist deMaine was joined by violinist Erin Keefe and pianist Craig Sheppard. All three of them played well, beautifully even, yet there was something about the performance that I found unsatisfying, and the problem lay in the matter of instrumental balance.

If you are not going to use the usual shorthand term “piano trio” in your program book, insisting instead on a longer form of title, you should at least get it right. The piano trio developed out of the piano-sonata genre. In Beethoven’s time, and right down to that of Brahms, a work for this combination of instruments was conceived as a “trio for piano, violin, and cello.” Much of the time, it seemed to me as if these performers were trying to justify the ordering of “Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano” as listed on the evening’s title-page. Craig Sheppard is a pianist possessed of considerable gifts and much elegance, and certainly has the chops to hold his own in this company, but at least in the first two movements his excessively retiring playing came nowhere near balancing the opulent tone Keefe and deMaine drew from their instruments. I am not suggesting that a pianist should hammer away without regard for his colleagues, but discretion can be carried too far, and I think it was on this occasion. Nor did it help that the first half-dozen bars of the slow movement elicited no fewer than three separate volleys of coughing from inconsiderate members of the audience, making it hard to register the mysterious atmosphere that earned the work its “Ghost” nickname, or that the texture of the finale was supplemented by a contribution from someone’s malfunctioning hearing-aid.

I should perhaps note, by the way, that another local reviewer commented, “Sheppard’s touch seemed a little heavy to me during the first movement”–so perhaps the effect simply depended on where one was sitting, though my experience of Lakeside School’s St. Nicholas Hall has never previously yielded any acoustical problems. However that may be, no such flaw blemished the splendid performance of Strauss’s ambitious and extraordinarily mature Piano Quartet. This time it was William Wolfram’s turn at the keyboard, and the interaction of his sonorous piano-playing with the sumptuous tone of violinist Nurit Bar-Josef, violist Richard O’Neill, and cellist Ronald Thomas was balanced impeccably. A youth-work this quartet may be, but its predominantly Brahmsian and Schumannesque manner already offers pointers forward to the characteristic style of the later Strauss. So, although the Beethoven must be accounted the more assured and polished of the two works, it was the Strauss that provided the evening’s greatest satisfaction, especially from the way the performers realized the inventive wit of the finale, with its cheekily insouciant tossing of little thematic fragments from one instrument to another.

Bernard Jacobson