SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

 

 

The program, combining a great late Haydn quartet and Mendelssohn’s First Piano Trio with one of Shostakovich’s finest works, could hardly have been more attractive or better balanced. And the performances were for the most part on the high level the Olympic Music Festival’s audiences have come to expect.

 

It’s true that, to my ears, ensemble at one or two points in Haydn’s D-major Quartet, Op. 76 No. 5, seemed less than ideally secure, but the work, in which Megumi Stohs played first violin and Elisa Barston second, was done with a delightful sense of the creative exploration typical of Haydn. (One of the crucial differences between Haydn’s music and that of his young friend and colleague Mozart is, I think, that when Haydn starts a work, he does so fully accepting that it could go anywhere, whereas the characteristic Mozart piece feels as if it has a clearly envisaged destination from the very first bar.)

 

For the first four of its five movements, Shostakovich’s profoundly searching Piano Quintet (with Elisa Barston on first violin and Ms. Stohs on second) was played with similar power, and with subtlety, virtuosity, and compelling expressivity in equal measure. It was only in the finale that the performance missed complete conviction. This is a movement that magically disperses the dark clouds that have lowered over much of what went before. But there was a certain somewhat mechanical stiffness about this rather deliberately paced reading that worked against full realization of the movement’s sunny swagger.

 

That movement could done with some of the flexibility of pulse the performers brought, along with powerful emotional focus and often dazzling virtuosity, to Mendelssohn’s D-minor Trio after intermission. Admittedly, I felt here that Elisa Barston’s violin tone was not as rich and her intonation not quite as immaculate as usual, but the familiar grace, warmth, and wit of her playing were fully in evidence. Amy Barston provided a firmly shaped tonal foundation, and though Natalya Ageyeva did not draw quite such beguiling sonorities from the festival’s piano as Paul Hersh is accustomed to finding in it, she responded persuasively to Mendelssohn’s often impassioned lyricism, and what Bernard Shaw would have called her “marksmanship” was spot on even in the work’s more vertiginous flights of fancy.

 

In all, then, a very fine concert that I refrain from calling great only because of the almost impossibly high standards Alan Iglitzin’s festival has led us to take for granted.

 

Bernard Jacobson