SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Shostakovich, Schumann and Elgar: Seattle Chamber Music Society artists, Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall, Benaroya Hall, Seattle 28.1.2010 (BJ)


Risking the accusation of being chauvinistically biased, I should like to suggest that Elgar’s Piano Quintet, Op. 84, was by some margin the best work on the opening program of the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s 2010 Winter Festival.

In this, Schumann’s bicentennial year, the emphasis of the compact four-concert festival is clearly on that composer’s music. By way of the customary pre-concert recital, the charismatic Alon Goldstein gave a charming talk, which he illustrated by playing short pieces by both Schumanns, Robert and Clara, and he returned to join Ilya Kaler, a violinist endowed with a particularly rich tone, and Amit Peled, no less impressive a cellist, in a passionately committed performance of Robert’s Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor. The concert proper, meanwhile, had opened with an equally fine performance of Shostakovich’s C-minor Trio, Op. 8, by violinist Lily Francis, cellist Robert deMaine, and pianist Anna Polonsky.

There was much to enjoy in both of those works. But the teenage Shostakovich’s apprentice work is not a patch on the great E-minor Trio he wrote 21 years later. And when we heard Elgar’s A-minor Quintet after intermission, the juxtaposition with the Schumann Trio was genuinely illuminating. For Elgar, in his only work for the medium, seems to me to have mastered the essentially problematic combination of string instruments with piano much more successfully. He stresses the contrast by way of a great deal of antiphonal writing between the solitary piano and the grouped strings. As a result, instrumental lines emerge much more lucidly than in the almost unrelieved tutti scoring of Schumann’s voluminous first movement, and with a clearer contrast between high and low points of expressive tension and dynamic force.

I was delighted to hear the Elgar live for the first time in more than 30 years. The first of its three movements is especially engrossing, charting a masterly course from the abrupt accents and broken rhythms with which it begins, by way of a subordinate theme of indolent yet curiously shadowed charm that might have come out of one of Brahms’s quieter Hungarian dances, to a mighty climax, and then back again to the opening material. All of this was realized superbly by violinists Erin Keefe and Amy Schwartz Moretti, violist Richard O’Neill (contributing some splendid succulent solos), cellist Bion Tsang, and William Wolfram, who balanced the power of the piano against the sonorities of the strings with exemplary judgement. The players–and surely also the work–were rewarded by a richly deserved standing ovation.

One of the pleasures of the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s programs is always the opportunity to hear several exponents of each instrument all in the same evening. Occasionally there are obvious disparities in artistry between one player and another. But this time, I am happy to report, the skills of all involved were on the highest level. My only tiny disappointment was with the somewhat thin tone the otherwise admirable Erin Keefe produced in the violin’s highest register–but this, I would almost be prepared to wager, meant only that she is in need of an instrument of a quality more commensurate with her evident talent. (Potential philanthropists please note!)

Bernard Jacobson