SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Mozart, Dvořák, and Beethoven: Stephen Bryant and Rachael Pearson, violins, Sayaka Kokubo and Sue Jane Bryant, violas, Rich Eckert, cello, The Island Gallery, Bainbridge Island, WA, 5.6.2009 (BJ)


It is a rare luxury to be able to hear superb chamber music, superbly played, in a room that seats only about 50 listeners. Now in its second season, this enterprising series, master-minded by Seattle Symphony violinist Stephen Bryant, presented the greatest music at the start of this evening of string quintets, but there was still plenty to enjoy in DvoÍák’s quirkily attractive Opus 97 in E-flat major and Beethoven’s C-major contribution to the genre, Op. 29.

The second movement of the Dvořák, in particular, offered Tokyo-born Sayaka Kokubo, who joined the Seattle Symphony two years ago, a chance to shine with especial brightness in a rich-toned and eloquently phrased viola solo, but she and her colleagues were no less convincing throughout the piece. Then came the C-major work; its thematic materials are not top-drawer Beethoven, yet the master is revealed in the music’s inexhaustibly creative way of moving from one point to another in the argument. Here again we were treated to a sparkling performance, cellist Rich Eckert’s deceptively insouciant handling of some real virtuoso challenges underpinning the texture to splendid effect.

Still, what remained most vividly in at least this listener’s mind after the concert ended was the work that had begun it: Mozart’s string-quintet arrangement (K. 406) of his C-minor Wind Serenade, K. 388. Touches especially worth noting in the design of this masterpiece are the pungent reshaping of the subordinate theme in the recapitulation of the first movement (looking forward to a parallel change in the finale of the great G-minor Symphony, K. 550); the rigorous canonic design of the minuet; and the mercurial character of the finale, a theme with eight variations. The fifth of these, in the relative major, exemplifies Mozart’s mastery of the subtlest element in composition, the art of transition. To my ears, the only real loss entailed in the switch from wind instruments to strings is at this point, with the heart-easing figure in the horns that transports us in a trice (and by way of a tierce) from saturnine C-minor introspection to a distant world of E-flat-major bliss, only to be used at the end of the variation to carry us back again. A stroke of purest and most poignant poetry, it would be closely echoed four years later, to similarly magical effect, in the nocturnal garden scene of Le nozze di Figaro.

Finely as the quintet played, strings could only hint at the enchantment of this passage. But in all other respects (aside from omitting the second-half repeat in the first movement and those in the da capo of the minuet) Bryant and his partners fashioned a performance of impeccable style, consummate technique, and often ravishing beauty. I hope they will continue next year with this invaluable contribution to the Seattle area’s musical life.

Bernard Jacobson


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