Zinman opened the program this week with Weber’s overture to his second big Romantic opera Euryanthe. The music to this opera has always been highly regarded among composers, but little heard because a hideously inept libretto has kept the work off the boards, unlike the occasionally mounted Der Freischütz. The Euryanthe overture, it must be said, also lacks some of the spontaneity of that of Freischütz, but it does have its moments. Weber’s purely instrumental music does not always make the best case for the esteem in which he is held in the German-speaking world, which appreciates his role in bringing German opera out of the Singspiel shadows into the European mainstream. No one performed this service for English opera until the twentieth century. The performance by the BSO under Zinman was, to our ears, nearly flawless. The conductor opened with a brisk, brash, and slightly brusque tempo for the horns, setting up perhaps a  too sharp contrast with the love-song second subject, but he brought a fine sense of drama to the whole, with some goosebump-inducing pianissimi and some brilliantly controlled crescendi.

The concerto that closed the first half of the program was Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in C, op. 15, with Norwegian superstar Leif Ove Andsnes. This is Andsnes’s third performance of Beethoven 1 this season, having done it in Pittsburgh and Montreal. We confess a soft spot for the First (yes, we know it’s really the second), which is the sassiest of the five, full of look-Ma-no-hands harmonic gyrations and compositional slyness (in the opening movement the piano doesn’t really play the principal theme until the cadenza and its music in the development has virtually nothing to do with the thematic material). Zinman took care to pare back the BSO orchestral complement to more period-appropriate size, and gave the opening a distinctly Mozartian flavor. The soloist was rather more forward in his approach without, however, wrecking the Classical-era ambience. An irony of this approach is that the program note by biographer Jan Swafford stressed the proto-Romantic elements of this concerto. Somebody must not have gotten the memo.

Of the performances by soloist and orchestra, we were once again deeply impressed by an Apollonian clarity that did nothing to obscure the work’s fundamental impishness. Andsnes employed virtually no rubato and very discreet pedaling. The orchestral playing was in many places stunningly good — a special bouquet to William Hudgins, the clarinetist, whose considerable solo work in the slow movement was tonally gorgeous and smooth as a silk-bottomed baby. Our only quibble had to do with Andsnes’s sometimes rushed answering phrases in the finale. As a point of information, Andsnes used one of Beethoven’s own cadenzas for the first movement, which are not the ones most commonly performed, owing perhaps to their brevity and relative lack of flash.

The Harbison Sixth Symphony is, like the Fifth, at least in part a vocal work. The opening movement is a setting for mezzo-soprano (Paula Murrihy) of James Wright’s “Entering the Temple in Nîmes.” While the use of sung music entered the Fifth Symphony at the direct suggestion of James Levine, Harbison let that idea recur more or less spontaneously for the Sixth (it didn’t work quite that way compositionally: the vocal idea came late in the process and prompted considerable revision of the other three movements to integrate it). The first movement introduces a couple of melodic ideas that recur importantly in later movements, as well as a sound effect: the use of the Hungarian cimbalom (think Kodály’s Háry Janos). As played by Nicholas Tolle, it created an occasionally spooky atmosphere. Its first occurrence, though, in the opening movement, was largely covered on Thursday by the dense contrapuntal web even within the chamber-sized instrumentation. Later appearances, despite a larger ensemble, were more audible (maybe there was a technical glitch in the possible miking of the cimbalom).

Before we attempt any kind of evaluation of the work, we should say that apart from whatever it was that obscured the cimbalom, the performance seemed as sympathetic and engaged in this piece as in anything else in the program. Murrihy sang with beautiful tone and excellent diction (a bit of dramatic stage business: she left stage after her movement). Zinman built force as the first movement proceeded, to the climactic seven lines of hard-driving rain (which the cimbalom was intended to reinforce), building and releasing tension in the slow movement, driving the Bernsteinesque rhythmic vitality of the scherzo, and gliding home (wherever that was) at the end. Zinman has a history with Harbison, and it seemed that his comfort level and enthusiasm infused the orchestra.

On occasions like this one is supposed to make some astute remarks about the success vel non of the new work. Honestly, we don’t know what to say, and suspect it would be fatuous even to try. Our random observations are that, like all Harbison’s work, this was constructed with excruciatingly meticulous care — and maybe too much so. There was plainly a sense of an overarching musical argument, but it wasn’t as immediately grabby a piece as a couple of the other entries in his symphonic œuvre we’ve heard. The scoring was typically thick and, except in the rhythmically charged scherzo (scherzoid might be a better term), may have kept our engagement at bay. The work seems as though repeated hearings might yield more of its juice, so we hope the BSO releases a recording on its site.

The program ended with one of the best performances of Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Lustige Streiche we have ever heard. It’s amazing how good Strauss can sound when a virtuoso orchestra plays him. Kudos go to Zinman for his conducting which was un-histrionic, but on top of everything. Kudos also go to the horns, whose deliberately raw opening statement of Till’s theme was a brilliant touch, to the clarinets, to concertmaster Malcolm Lowe, and to anybody else who had a featured part to play. There is a certain subset of the audience, the high-toned intelligentsia (you know who you are), who came to hear the Harbison and, disdaining the proletarian appeal of Strauss, decamped before Eulenspiegel. Fie on them, we say, music for pure visceral fun is an essential part of one’s humanity.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

The program opened with a fairly straightforward but contrapuntally active a cappella setting of “O come, O come, Emmanuel” by Alice Parker and Robert Shaw (both of them? Really?), in which Music Director Betsy Burleigh displayed a strong penchant for extreme dynamic contrasts, most notably in some hugely audience-pleasing short-range diminuendi. The chorus’s ensemble and phrasing were impeccable, especially in the tricky lines “Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel/Shall come to Thee O Israel,” which church choirs and congregations usually render with a pause fatal to the meaning.

The remainder of the first half consisted of the Respighi, one of only two major chorus-and-instruments pieces completed by the composer of the Roman trilogy of tone poems and the three suites of Ancient Airs and Dances. Like his rough contemporary at the other end of Europe, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Respighi combined influences from Impressionism and Medieval modalism to create a sound simultaneously old and new. The Laud (the title is often rendered in English without “of the Lord” at the end, but a full translation from the Italian should have it), written in 1928-30, is a fine amalgam of both, as well as some fine harmonic tricks that reflect Respighi’s personal wit, such as the sudden chromatic harmonic bending of a modal melody. We would tell you more about the composer and the piece, but we stumbled across a remarkable presentation here, albeit in outline form, that tells you at least as much as you will likely want to know.

One thing we will remark on is the canny instrumentation — the ensemble comprises two flutes (Susan Thomas and Ellen Redman), oboe (Cheryl Bishkoff), English horn (Donna Cobert), two bassoons (Gregory Newton and Sebastian —“Sebastion” in the program — Chaves), triangle (Kim Petot), and piano four hands (Terry Halco and Roderick Phipps-Kettlewell). The emphasis on double reeds is a nod to the pastoral quality of the text, a 13th-century dialogue (well, trialogue, to be precise) attributed to the Umbrian Franciscan monk Jacopone di Todi. It is written in Dante-esque dialect, in which the Nativity tale is related from the viewpoint of the shepherds, whom Respighi assigns to a tenor solo (Gregory Zavracky) and the male choral singers. The other characters for whom soloists are assigned are an angel (Kathy Linger, soprano) and Mary (Majie Zeller, mezzo).

Burleigh began at a brisk pace (maybe a bit faster than she had rehearsed it, as some musical details got smudged). We thought the chorus was well together and in fine voice; once again, the pianissimi produced a thrilling effect, but also the big set-piece Gloria near the end was effective and packed the necessary punch. Linger’s phrasing and intonation were spot on, though her somewhat thin sound was sometimes overwhelmed by the chorus and ensemble. Her diction was a bit difficult to evaluate, as the text is non-standard Italian, but without the text before one’s eyes it was hard to decipher. Zeller has a much fuller sound, which carried pretty well and was the most dramatically effective of the three soloists. Zavracky’s tone was clarion, his voice powerful, and his pitch nicely centered.

Other works on the program, apart from the sing-alongs, included some interesting settings from Gaudete by Anders Öhrwall, a Swedish choral conductor, which displayed rhythmic vitality and some gentle modernisms of idiom. Alfred Burt’s setting of Bright, Bright the Holly Berries featured some occasionally quartal harmony, while Stephen Paulus’s rendition of The Holly and the Ivy was a from-scratch setting of the text with much commendable rhythmic urgency, despite its adherence to the strophic format of the carol — all well conveyed by CPM. We like this setting almost as much as that of Virgil Thomson.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

Exhibit A was Beethoven’s Twelve Variations for Piano and Cello in G major on “See the conquering hero comes” from Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabaeus,” to give it its full title, WoO 45. These variations, dating from 1796, show that from a surprisingly early period Beethoven was moving away from the chiefly decorative style of variation writing that underlay even Haydn and Mozart’s works of this type, toward a deeper and richer digging into the harmonic and motivic guts of the principal tune. Each variation has a distinct character, and the entire set is “fit up,” in Virgil Thomson’s phrase, into a unit that resembles a sonata movement, with a proper recapitulation about three-fourths of the way through. Thus, from the standpoint of the program’s argument, this was a set of explicit variations constituting a larger structure. Guest cellist Peter Stumpf, who was principal cellist of the LA Philharmonic and now teaches at Indiana University, along with BCMS pianist Randall Hodgkinson, gave a well-shaped account that conveyed both the individuality of the variations and the architecture of the whole work. Stumpf kept his touch on the light side, perhaps in deference to the early date of this piece in Beethoven’s catalogue.

The Brahms Trio in A minor for clarinet, cello and piano, op. 114, that ended the first half is, paradoxically, the work on the program least amenable to the gloss Schoenberg and Frisch put on its composer’s style. At least, that’s the case when one ventures beyond the superficial observation that a lot of Brahms’s melodies here involve a second half that is the inversion of the first. Daniel Gregory Mason, writing his classic study of Brahms’s chamber music in 1933, saw this as a weakness; Schoenberg, writing in 1947, saw it as a strength (because it anticipated his own process). What Mason thought about Schoenberg is probably not printable in family media such as this.

Brahms’s four works for clarinet — this trio, the Quintet op. 115, and the two sonatas of op. 120 — are, along with Mozart’s concerto and quintet, the bedrock of the clarinet repertoire, and although the trio is probably the weakest of the four, any clarinetist worth his or her salt craves the chance to tackle it at least several times in a career. For this occasion, instead of its own stellar clarinetist Thomas Hill, BCMS presented the New York-based Israeli Alexander Fiterstein, together with Stumpf and Hodgkinson. Stumpf displayed a good deal more power and resonance here than in the Beethoven, while Hodgkinson contributed considerable warmth and richness and, as required, tactful support where the other instruments take the leading role. Fiterstein is a highly capable and adroit player, with an elegant, smooth tone and superb phrasing and breath control. In short, this was a very good and satisfactory performance overall. What it lacked was the sense of passion and urgency that makes for a great performance. The 20-year-old BCMS recording with Hill, Ronald Thomas and Mihae Lee was just such a great performance, which for us remains the definitive one, eclipsing those by much more famous players.

It was a touch of programming inspiration to open the second half with a Bach trio sonata, this the one for flute, violin and continuo from The Musical Offering, BWV 1079. In this age of historical performance practices, a modern-instruments reading of a Bach work might raise eyebrows, but in some respects the practice has at least partial justification for TMO, which arose from King Frederick II (“the Great”) of Prussia’s showing off his newfangled instrument, the piano, to the visiting Bach. Like all the other components of TMO, the trio sonata is based on the peculiar and convoluted theme on which Frederick set Bach the task of  improvising fugues. In the slow-fast-slow-fast sonata da chiesa format, the trio’s slow movements approach the theme obliquely, dissecting and reassembling its motivic material in ways that disguise the tune, while the fast movements deal with it more directly and contrapuntally. The trio performing it (the flutist and violinist standing, in their one nod to Baroque practice) consisted of Lorna McGhee, principal flutist of the Pittsburgh Symphony, BCMS member Harumi Rhodes, violin, and Hodgkinson, whose use of the piano made of this much more of a trio in the contemporary sense. Their playing style was unapologetically modern, with Rhodes using ample vibrato, Hodgkinson pedaling, and McGhee supplying a rich, fat and forward sound owing nothing to the wooden flauto traverso. The ensemble performed with spirit and momentum in the fast movements and the Andante third movement, but seemed dullish in the opening Largo; the concluding Allegro jig was sprightly and charming while pointing up the ramifications of Frederick’s tune. One difficulty, however, was that Rhodes could not produce the sheer volume of sound needed to match McGhee.

The Schoenberg op. 9 Chamber Symphony No. 1 in E Major occupies a critical spot in its composer’s output — not as blatantly so as the op. 10 string quartet, which finally took the plunge into atonality in its finale, but because it showed what the logical conclusion might be to the progressive expansion of tonality to embrace the entire chromatic spectrum. After hearing its premiere in 1906, Mahler was famously moved to declare that Schoenberg had crossed a threshold he (Mahler) could never see himself treading; and indeed, notwithstanding the dissonant outbursts in Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, nothing he or Strauss wrote was ever quite as vertiginous as the harrowing roller-coaster Schoenberg set loose in this symphony (a courtesy title, really, as its one movement does not even nod toward the multi-movement structure that other single-movement symphonies usually synthesize).

The version of the Schoenberg the BCMS put on — and here we must digress to say that “BCMS” is becoming a bit of a courtesy title, as a majority of performers on Sunday were guests — was a reduction (a reduction of a reduction, one might say) by Anton Webern for Pierrot ensemble. One must tread cautiously in evaluating Webern arrangements as works of the original composer; his Bach orchestrations, for example, are far more Webern than Bach — but here he seemed on best behavior, allowing the original melodic lines their continuity; maybe this was because in 1933, when he made the transcription, Schoenberg was very much alive and able to keep tabs. We should further observe that even with the comforting “E Major” in the title, the name Schoenberg on the program seemed sufficient to drive a small exodus of audience from the room. The reduced scoring traded power, warmth and color for clarity of line, which the ensemble — McGhee, Fiterstein, Rhodes, Stumpf and Hodgkinson — delivered with commendable spirit and precision. What the scoring also did, albeit inadvertently, was to uncover a few bald spots in the music. Overall, this was an exceptionally fine performance of this work in a “handy” version that permits close inspection of the composer’s ideas.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

John Harbison with conductor Jiri Belohlavek and Sasha Cooke (Stu Rosener photo)

My (or, sometimes, Oh my), what a difference a week can make. On December 1, under a new guest conductor, the Czech maestro  Jirí Belohlávek, who is now the principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and who will next year become music director (again) of the Czech Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony once again delved into the symphonic œuvre of John Harbison and followed up with two favorite Beethoven works.

One thing that was the same this week as last was the orchestral seating profile, which we are now ready to concede is the “new normal.” At the risk of beating a dead horse — whack! — we fail to see any benefit in an arrangement that concentrates all the principal string parts, high and low, on one side of the stage. While an acoustically well-blended space like Symphony Hall goes a long way toward mitigating the sonic imbalance this causes, 1) it doesn’t go all the way; 2) it creates visual imbalance; and 3) it distorts the aural orientation of radio and website listeners. One might counter by saying that the brass, which largely congregate to the conductor’s right, pick up the slack, but while this might be plausible in modern works like Harbison’s that have big brass parts (though, for reasons we will mention below, this was not the case this time), it’s unjustified when works from earlier times, like Beethoven’s, are involved. Perhaps our acoustically knowledgeable readers can enlighten us on what is so compelling about the current seating plan.

Harbison’s Fifth Symphony is, so far, his only vocal one. While divided into four movements, they are all attached and convey a sense of a single line of thought. This reflects the unified literary theme of the work, the Orpheus legend (which, senso largo, was also the theme of the entire concert — a brilliant bit of programming, that). The story about the symphony is that when the BSO commissioned it for its 125th anniversary in 2006, Harbison started it as a purely instrumental work evoking generally an idea of loss. James Levine suggested that Harbison incorporate vocal parts, and, as they say, “the rest, as they say, is history.” The largest chunk of the piece, forming the first two movements, is a setting for baritone (Gerald Finley) of Czeslaw Milosz’s poem, Orpheus and Eurydice, a quirky “modern-dress” telling of the failed rescue by the former of the latter from the depths of Hades. (Harbison used the English translation by Milosz and Robert Haas). The third movement sets the seldom-heard voice of Eurydice (Sasha Cooke, mezzo) in Louise Glück’s poem, Relic, while the fourth brings both voices together in Stephen Mitchell’s translation of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, nos. 11 and 13.

Harbison was quite up-front in his program note in wondering whether listeners could take in vocal settings like these as a true symphony. The answer, of course, as always, is “it depends.” Mahler considered Das Lied von der Erde to be a symphony, and Shostakovich and others have declared as symphonies things that could be mistaken for song cycles. The issue is always how bound musical materials are to the specific texts. Harbison’s Fifth begins with a wide-ranging, jagged figure for orchestra that coalesces into a kind of theme. This material recurs in various ways at key points throughout the four movements and returns at the end. Our trouble is that the vocal writing seldom relates to this or any other symphonically developed material that we could tell on first hearing (an important caveat) and focuses instead on the local necessities of the text. Some of the music for the voices is quite arresting — notably the set piece in the second movement in which Orpheus sings persuasively to Persephone of the joys of mortal life in the upper world. Much of it, though, owing in part to Milosz’s conversational tone and partly to whatever Harbison was getting from these texts, was blandly matter-of-fact. There are key spots, we are told, in which the tone and color of the music changes—at the break between first and second movements and for the third movement, for example — but apart from some scoring differences (e.g. the introduction of an electric guitar as an ironic stand-in for Orpheus’s nine-string lyre, the odd blast from the brass), the music seemed all rather the same, gray, medium-slow and earnest. In several places there were attempts at climaxes, such as the agonizingly slow build during Orpheus’s long walk back to the surface, but these tended to peter out. The gestures did, indeed, sometimes change: the third movement, “Relic,” is melismatic, the fourth movement featured downward scalar patterns; but on the whole, the kind of variety-within-unity (or vice versa) that keeps a multi-movement work engaging didn’t cross our ears.

The bright spots in this performance were those of the singers, especially Gerald Finley, whose direct, clear tone, dynamic modulation, and impeccable diction were stellar, and Sasha Cooke, whose diction and theatrics were not up to Finley’s but whose tone was radiant. As for the orchestra, we suspect it had a bit of trouble making sense of the piece, as the playing was often rather tentative, a far cry from the brilliance with which it conveyed Harbison’s Fourth Symphony last week.

Pianist Jonathan Biss with Jiri Belohlavek (Stu-Rosner)

A very different kind of sameness (anyone who wants to use that as a movie title had better credit us) afflicted the performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, op. 58, that followed the intermission. The soloist was Jonathan Biss, scion of a distinguished musical family (Grandma was cellist Raya Garbousova; Mom is violinist Miriam Fried) and a high-voltage virtuoso in his own right. Biss is a highly physical performer with lots of swooshing, swooning, and flourishes; his rubato is judiciously employed, and his dynamics are well modulated. He created great swelling waves of sound in his passagework in the outer movements, and especially in the first-movement cadenza. Anything amiss about this? Not at all, especially if one is expecting a performance of the Fifth Piano Concerto. A Fourth concerto played for this kind of effect is, well, played for this kind of effect, and not for what makes the Fourth unique. Frankly, at age 30, Biss is too old to be a wunderkind any longer and should take a more reflective approach to this piece. Perhaps we’re being too harsh; this kind of playing has tremendous audience appeal, and in all fairness the critically important slow movement saw Biss waxing poetic, in the musical guise of Orpheus charming the Furies (as was first suggested by Adolf Marx in 1859), although with little new to say about this amazing music.

“Little new to say” is also the stick we’ll use to belabor Belohlávek’s work with the orchestra. Tempi were moderate (a bit brisker in the finale), ensemble perfectly in order, the progression from ferocity to docility in the strings of the slow movement just what the doctor ordered. Apart from a lack of crispness in the strings’ articulation in the finale, we have, in short, nothing to complain about in the playing or conducting, but last week we got three revelatory performances, and revelatory this was not.

What was, fortunately, at a level equal to last week’s, and the antithesis of perfunctory, was the closer of the evening, Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3. Forget the title “Overture,” this is a tone poem avant la lettre, one of Beethoven’s best blends of storytelling with classical form. And, in the other aspect of the Orpheus theme, it was about a rescue (a successful one this time, and of the husband by the wife — a lesson in that, perhaps?). Belohlávek was all over it. From the moment we perceived the expectant hush in the introduction, we knew that this would be a terrific reading, and so it was. The crescendo from the soft opening of the allegro was perfectly wrought; the solos of Elizabeth Rowe, flute, and Thomas Rolfs, trumpet, from offstage, were superb. We’re very grateful the concert ended this way, a successful rescue operation in yet another sense.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

Ludovic Morlot conducts the BSO (Stu Rosner photo)

The unsettled state of artistic affairs at the Boston Symphony has mercifully not interrupted its John Harbison cycle, which proceeded this week (we caught the Saturday night performance, November 26) under the baton of its former assistant conductor and newly appointed music director of the Seattle Symphony (and of Brussels’ La Monnaie opera company), Ludovic Morlot. M. Morlot’s program, a notably long and ambitious one technically, also included Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2 and, just for a lagniappe, Mahler’s  Symphony No. 1.

It’s not unusual any more to see conductors play around with the placement of performers — almost always a matter of where the strings sit, as nobody seems to experiment with, say, the bassoons or horns. Morlot had the second violins and cellos change places from the standard seating pattern — not an uncommon move any more — but then also arranged the contrabasses to his left and the harps on the right. Your guess is as good as ours whether this makes any difference in balance or acoustics in the repertoire he was doing; it just bunches the high and low strings on the same side. Note to those who listen to the radio broadcasts: there’s nothing wrong with your radio, Morlot’s just messing with your head.

John Harbison’s Symphony No. 4, written in fact for the Seattle Symphony in 2003, is a five-movement work that, according to the composer’s note, began as a digging-out exercise (one might almost characterize it as an exorcism) from the musical world of The Great Gatsby, his semi-successful opera for the Met. Thus, the first movement, “Fanfare,” picks up the Jazz Age feel of Gatsby in a rhythmically driven figure that might have been the opening of Gershwin’s unwritten symphony, if that had come after Porgy and Bess. The brassy bits alternate with and are sometimes overwhelmed by string passagework that is engagingly developed until it just stops mid-air. This kind of non-ending becomes a feature of most of the movements. The Intermezzo that follows has a deliberately hard time getting off the ground, with assertive statements answered and subverted by gamelan-like noises. Harbison is a brilliant orchestrator, who has invested even his most tentative ideas in multicolored robes that dazzle. Brilliant orchestration, we should add, was a kind of linking theme for the entire evening’s performances.

Like Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, Harbison’s Fourth puts the Scherzo at the center and makes it the most elaborately constructed and longest movement. It’s not especially jolly, for reasons soon to be mentioned, but it maintains a fairly jazzy feel within an unusually strong (for Harbison) triple meter. The “trio” explores some of the deepest sonorities in the orchestra, contrasting sharp attacks in winds and brass with gentler string passages. Again, the conclusion leaves one suspended. The explanation for all this tentativeness may be the fourth movement, styled “Threnody.” One gathers from the composer’s note that the subject here is not a mortality, but mortality itself, a sharp reminder of which entered Harbison’s life while he was writing this work and resulted in this movement’s completion at lightning speed. It has an almost 19th-century feel to it, rather Tchaikovskian in its way, and powerfully emotive. Morlot responded in kind and lavished exquisite attentions on every swell and throb. As much under this movement’s shadow as the Scherzo was the Finale, which mustered a number of build-ups that never quite coalesce into that sum-it-all-up feeling. Attempts to re-conjure the bright spots of earlier movements seem always doomed, and while the work does end with an emphatic climax, it was an obviously equivocal one.

We hope Harbison, who was there to receive his just accolades, was pleased with the performance; we thought it a masterful one that carried a full measure of conviction. Morlot is a highly energetic performer who errs, if at all, on the side of over-involvement. He also has a rather strange approach to a beat, especially in slow passages, where his stick anticipates it many times before finally committing. We wonder how the players acclimate to that, but there was certainly no evidence of insecurity in the ensemble.

The first half closed with Daphnis et Chloé, Suite no. 2 of Ravel, a work the BSO has played so many times, under so many conductors, that they can probably do it in their sleep, notwithstanding its fearsome technical demands (under every long line there are a dozen players frantically keeping up with irregular rapid subdivisions of the beat). There was nobody, onstage or off, though, sleeping through this performance, which was a virtuoso turn for the conductor and all the players. Flutist Elizabeth Rowe was credited as soloist, and her passages were magical indeed; but we’ll also give a shout-out to John Ferrillo, the oboist, whose own solos complemented Rowe’s and were every bit as lovely, if not nearly as extensive. Morlot shone as well, bringing out all Ravel’s brilliant colors with clarity and precision.

One would imagine that after such workouts as these, the orchestra would kick back with something relatively straightforward, but no! By golly, we were going to get a Mahler symphony on top of all that. Granted, the Symphony No. 1 in D Major is Mahler’s shortest, but that’s not saying much, and in terms of affect, despite its formal clarity it probably ranges wider than most of the other eight-and-a-half.

A brief digression: a performance of Mahler 1 was one of the first things we ever reviewed, way back in college, as the student orchestra struggled gamely with music that was so far beyond its technical capacity so that the only decent thing to write about it was compliments on the effort. But just as the young Mahler was merciless in his demands on players, we were equally and cruelly so. Nostra culpa! If anyone reading this now was performing so long ago and far away, we issue our unqualified apology.

No apologies, though, were needed for the BSO’s rendition Saturday. Morlot kept his tempi generally on the relaxed side (he wasn’t watching the clock) and let the players luxuriate in the great soft and loud waves of passionate sound that Mahler unleashed. The first movement introduction shimmered with expectation, punctuated with crisp pizzicato and the perfectly precise (though slightly too loud) flourishes of the offstage trumpets. The body of the first movement was mostly as relaxed and genial in its nature-worship as, well, a walk in the park. The Scherzo, the only movement to gain Brahms’s gruff approbation when Mahler showed him the score, was bouncy in the outer sections and über-gemütlich in the trio, and Morlot milked it for all the gentle satire it embodied. The more pointed satire of the funeral march (in the US we think of the tune as “Frère Jacques,” but in German-speaking countries it is “Bruder Martin,” a Counter-Reformation swipe at Martin Luther, whose intent would have been well understood in Austria) was deliciously brought out. Edwin Barker’s opening contrabass solo was, as one would expect, polished but not stagey. The brass and winds were just a bit overbearing at the first entry of the countersubject, but otherwise all the sonorities played nicely together, whether the prevailing mood was arch or childlike. The fadeout was thrilling, so much the better to make the audience jump at the fierce opening of the Finale, with its snarling sforzandi. This movement, progressing from anguished F minor to glowingly beatific D major, covers more ground than most Mahler movements, and Morlot conducted the somewhat wild ride with clarity and architectural precision. Some conductors take the final two notes, the octave drop on D, as goofy satire, but Morlot accepted them at face value, which seems more emotionally fitting.

Overall, we were more satisfied with this evening at Symphony than we have been in several recent outings. Morlot worked hard, but everyone worked just as hard with him. It was really the sort of first-rate musical experience that BSO audiences should be entitled to expect every week.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

SJE has an acoustic, defined by a high ceiling and hard surfaces, that simultaneously ricochets and swallows sound. The opening remarks of Lidiya Yankovskaya and Frederick Jodry, music directors of Juventas and Schola Cantorum respectively, were unintelligible at a distance of twenty feet. Luckily for a small ensemble like Schola, which makes SJE its home base, its nine singers actually benefit from the reverb, assuming one is not straining to make out the words. We would hate to hear an orchestra there, though. The opening work, Josquin’s Responde mihi, sung a cappella, confirmed the unsigned program note’s observation that the music does not correspond to modern listeners’ expectation that sad or stern texts (this one, intended for the Matins of the Dead liturgy, is from Job, and begins “Answer me, how many are my iniquities and misdeeds?” and goes on in similar mien) would be set to minor-mode and would be solemnly intoned. Josquin’s rhythms seem cheekily bouncy, though surely no satire was intended by him or the performers. The Schola’s performance, led by Jodry from within the ensemble, after a bit of wobbly intonation at the outset, was clear, clean and well blended, allowing the listener to follow the intricacies of Josquin’s lines. We will be the first to acknowledge lack of expertise in this genre, but from where we sat, literally and figuratively, it sounded well done.

What constitutes new and old music being relative for new music groups; we would guess that Juventas would consider Arvo Pärt’s 1985 Stabat Mater to fall in the latter category. Originally for only three voices (soprano, alto and tenor) and string trio, Pärt rescored it for full chorus and orchestra in 2008. The version performed Friday (there were repeat performances Saturday in Providence and Sunday at Boston Conservatory) was a hybrid, using the small Schola choir and the string trio, comprising Yohanan Chendler, violin, Drew Ricciardi, viola and Rachel Arnold, cello, again directed by Jodry. Composed with Pärt’s characteristic blend of scalar and arpeggiated passages, it begins with a “sinfonia” featuring a descending three-note scalar motif that makes sometimes pungent interlocking patterns among the instruments. The chorus enters wordlessly to similar effect, and this pattern continues, now expanding, now contracting. The text proper begins on a different tune. While holding his basic ideas, Pärt achieves great variety with rhythmic transformations, in fine Renaissance-cum-Minimalist fashion. It’s a powerfully moving work, sometimes giving off hints of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. Its expressive restraint becomes its own highly charged antithesis. The performances were apt and unobtrusive to the overall effect. Marc Donnelly, alto, in particular impressed with a beautifully floating descant solo.

Three works followed intermission. The first was the premiere of Derek David’s “Daphne’s aria” from a scenic cantata called Apollo and Daphne after Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In this scene, Daphne (Sudie Marcuse, soprano) implores her father, Perseus (Jodry, baritone) not to insist that she marry — men and sex being so icky and all that — while Perseus protests and grudgingly relents. David has chosen to set Ovid’s Latin in church/mediæval style rather than classical pronunciation, and the singers seemed to grace the church’s rough handling of words in a neo-Romantic musical idiom. Daphne’s lines soar and plead, while Perseus’s are gruff and matter-of-factly parlando. The instrumental parts, for flute (Zachary Jay), violin (Chendler), viola (Ricciardi), viola da gamba (Douglas Kelley; a nice touch in orchestration), piano (Julia Scott Carey; this part would have sounded better on a harpsichord), were obviously influenced by Baroque settings of classical literature and legends. This short excerpt, conducted by Yankovskaya, was intriguing and left us wanting to hear the rest of the cantata.

Oliver Caplan is a former conductor for Juventas. His Song on May Morning, a setting of an uncharacteristically cheerful poem by Milton (“Hail bounteous May that dost inspire/Mirth and youth, and warm desire” are not sentiments one normally associates with devout Puritans, except for the wayward sort who inspired Hanson’s Merrymount). To go even farther afield, Caplan’s idiom and style of vocal setting–for chorus, flute (Jay), clarinet (Alexis Lanz), violin (Chendler), cello (Arnold) and piano (Carey)–reminded us of the Tintin characters Thompson and Thomson, in this case Randall and Virgil, respectively. This mellifluous work, of which this performance was the premiere, may find great favor among high school and college choruses; we couldn’t see much of interest below its friendly and genial surface. The ensemble, conducted by Jodry, gave a chipper and seemingly accurate performance.

The program ended with another Stabat Mater, this one a 2007 work by Dominick DiOrio, who now plies composing and choral conducting in the Houston area. This setting adopts quite a different approach from that of Pärt or, indeed, most other composers. Like Brahms’s and Hindemith’s “requiems” DiOrio has forgone the traditional liturgical texts and set a variety of other sacred and secular ones —specifically, the three vocal movements of this five-movement piece set, are Whitman, the Ave Maria, and Dickinson. These are bookended by instrumental sections, “La méditation au Corps Cassé” and an Epitaph. The Whitman, “In midnight sleep,” and the Dickinson, “This world is not conclusion,” are for countertenor (Martin Near) and ensemble, while the Ave Maria uses the entire chorus with the countertenor. The opening meditation displays martial flourishes, a fitting introduction to Whitman’s Civil War poem, in which the poet berates himself for his “callous composure” in the face of carnage and death, only to be pursued by the recurring nightmare of what he saw. DiOrio’s setting is highly effective, in a lucid modern idiom, with Near’s sweet tone well conveying the placid denial of brutal reality (the words, alas, rendered undecipherable). The emotional punch of this movement is paradoxically weakened as DiOrio progressed to a more directly expressive mode toward the end. The Ave Maria is one of the most striking modern settings we have heard, and was our favorite bit of music for the evening. The chorus and ensemble (Jay, Lanz, Ricciardi, Arnold, Carey, Kelley, and Brian Calhoon, percussion, Yankovskaya conducting) embodied the literally iconic dignity of Mary, here not the mater dolorosa but rather the serene recipient of human supplication. The Dickinson setting, as is the wont of modern writing, ignores the poem’s metrics and conveys instead a sense of urgency that also seems contrapuntal to the gentle optimism of the text. The composer’s note on the work said it contained “no hint of optimism…” Yet the Dickinson poem reads that way, so one wonders why DiOrio felt compelled to use it. The closing Epitaph, somber in tone and spare in sonority, featured highly evocative clarinet lines, beautifully conveyed by Lanz, and some very fine and delicate playing by percussionist Calhoon.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

Conductor Myung-Whun Chung with Garrick Ohlsson (Stu Rosner photo)

The Boston Symphony’s November 10 performance brought together two warhorses by Carl Maria von Weber and P. I. Tchaikovsky, the former of which paradoxically hasn’t been much performed by the BSO lately, with a work long more heard of than heard, the Barber Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, with the estimable Garrick Ohlsson. On the revolving podium this week was Myung-Whun Chung, who has not conducted the BSO for fifteen years, this being only his third series of concerts with the orchestra.

The Weber was the overture to Die Freischütz, the opera that is now widely claimed to be the first German Romantic opera. (There were earlier works that might have an equal claim, including some by Spohr, but we’ll let that pass.) Der Freischütz (the Marksman) got a full staging in Boston not too long ago, a true rarity, but the overture is even by itself one of Weber’s most impressive works, with its evocations of spooky forests, overweening ambition, supernatural chicanery and true love thereby destroyed. Chung’s reading, using a full orchestral complement —period authenticity be damned — got some charming and expressive effects, like the growly soft (though not soft enough) opening. He chose brisk tempi and went for some big, stagy effects. This came, alas, at the expense of clear articulation, especially in the lower strings, and a certain lack of overarching concept, as he telegraphed his punches at nearly every climax.

Samuel Barber’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, op. 38, was arguably the high-water mark of the composer’s career, in the sense of revealing him at the apex of his public esteem, earning applause, critical praise, and his second Pulitzer Prize (not counting the two Pulitzer traveling fellowships he won in the 1930s before the prizes were awarded as such). We were present, not at the world premiere the BSO gave in New York in 1962 under Leinsdorf, but at the New York Philharmonic’s first performance the following year, when we high-schoolers lucky enough to have snagged student subscriptions were treated to a panel discussion featuring Barber, the dedicatee pianist John Browning, and, if memory serves, conductor Thomas Schippers. Barber freely admitted he was utterly incapable of playing the piece himself and expressed his awe and astonishment at Browning’s doing so, so brilliantly. So brilliantly, in fact, that Browning truly owned the work for the next forty years. Indeed, in all that time, till the pianist’s death in 2003, only two people ever played this concerto: John Browning and Not John Browning. For this reason, we were brimming with giddy anticipation that a third pianist would perform, no less than the protean Ohlsson, to put an individual stamp on the work that could lead to a true second life for it.

The fact that Barber was once America’s most popular classical composer, who clothed an awesome technical command in a personal brand of hysterical lyrical Romanticism (oh my, how the High Modernists hated Barber!), can obscure the fact that this concerto marked a new direction for him, in which he sought accommodation with the more fragmented sounds and sparse sonorities of 1950s asceticism and the coming storm of 1960s chaos. Thus, in the opening movement, which overall is in G Major, lines break off abruptly, scoring is often chamber-like in alternation with big noisy outbursts, and one can sense — as our seatmate Thursday did —that it just doesn’t hang together. The classic Barber lyricism reasserts itself in the slow movement, and the bang-up throbbing 5/8 rondo finale largely carries itself. For the whole piece to work, though, requires a grand, unified, thoughtful conception.

What transpired Thursday wasn’t even close. Not only was Ohlsson, whose technical prowess was unquestionable and probably superior even to Browning’s, unable to make himself sound much different from the somewhat aloof polish of the latter (where was the great Chopin interpreter in the slow movement?), but there were times when his expressions and bearing — something that cannot go unnoticed in such an imposing physical presence — seemed to convey the wish that this all be over soon. To this difficulty was added Chung’s own FX-oriented direction, rather reminiscent of those elements of the Ozawa years we would most like to forget. To be sure, the quality of the playing by the orchestra musicians was tip-top; with as much solo work as there is for them in this concerto, it had better be. While many solo licks deserve praise, we will here mention Elizabeth Rowe’s dusky solo at the opening of the slow movement (which in fact Barber adapted from an earlier work for flute and orchestra) and, as the usually unsung hero of that movement, oboist John Ferrillo, who frequently carried the melodic ball passed by the flute. The finale, we must admit, left us in our usual funk over how orchestras mangle the principal tune. While the episodes, in slower tempi, were fine, the cracking whip of the ostinato main subject leaves them — now the BSO included —seemingly incapable of counting to five. There is a crucial rest on the second beat, which is inevitably stretched to sound like two, making the saucy 5/8 into a dull 6/8. We lay this charge at Chung’s feet. He should have heard this problem and done more to correct it, even if it means leaning harder on the third beat.

We will, in the interest of full disclosure and the setting of expectations, say right up front that we are not big Tchaikovsky fans. We acknowledge his technical mastery, we proclaim him one of the greatest melodists ever and a brilliant orchestrator to boot. Where we cannot follow is the “too much is never enough” aesthetic, with its attendant bathos. So, with that in mind, our approach to a session in the Tchaiko ward with the Symphony No. 6 in b minor, the Pathétique, was not without discomfiture. Luckily, our attention was sufficiently distracted from the substance of the piece by the particulars of the performance that we can dispense with any further fulminations along aesthetic lines.

What we observed was, first, and most obviously, some brilliant playing. Craig Nordstrom had the unenviable (well, maybe it was enviable) task of taking the bass clarinet to ppppp (or was that pppppp?) in a first movement passage that, it may surprise you, as it always amazes us, to know, was actually written for bassoon, which not only cannot play that softly but sounds too croaky in that register to produce the intended effect. The brass, too, has much to say in this symphony and said it with great integrity and not a bit of, well, brass.

The problems, as we heard them, were, as throughout the program, at the top: Chung passed up many opportunities to squeeze any shiver-inducing pianissimos from the ensemble and lurched from moment to moment without a sense of grand sweep. His tempi, on the other hand, were continually and on the whole commendably brisk, notably so in the 5/4 waltz and even in the finale. The latter, of course is meant to be lugubrious, but without a brilliant sense of slo-mo propulsion can be merely deadly; thus, a faster beat, like powdered sugar, can cover a multitude of sins. Chung achieved a commendable crispness without loss of articulation in the third movement march, which, true to form, awoke some dozers who then applauded as if the piece were over. Overall, though, we saw too many trees and too little forest.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

The performer draw was an all-star assortment of players mainly surrounding distinguished cellist and NEC faculty member Paul Katz, with the young but impressive Jupiter String Quartet and other notables we will mention later. The only thing lacking was program notes, which were provided only for the Mahler and Schnittke. In partial compensation, Katz provided oral exegesis, but of necessity these comments were somewhat truncated and anecdotal (more on his remarks, later). The Spohr in particular could have used more explication.

One should feel some pity for chamber musicians who love Mahler. While great composers in other media, for example Verdi, produced at least one mature work for small forces, all there is from Mahler is one completed movement and one abandoned fragment of the next, from a piano quartet written at age 16 as a school exercise. As such, and presumably because someone like Robert Fuchs was grading it, it is largely devoid of the characteristics that now appeal to listeners of his symphonies and song cycles. The movement came to light only in the 1960s — luckily, at a time when interest in Mahler was picking up — and has since become popular not only with professional performers but with students. It is mellifluous, competent, with a few points of interest such as a unison trill at several spots; but one can see why young Mahler got bored with it after it had served its academic purpose. One interesting thing about it is its rather slow tempo for an opening sonata-form movement: if you like, you can see a prefiguring of the Third, Seventh, Ninth and Tenth symphonies. The foursome that performed it Monday — NEC’s Lucy Chapman, violin, Dimitri Murrath, viola, and Katz, with Gloria Chien, piano — were resonant, lucid and commanding from the first note and all the way through; we couldn’t hope for a better reading.

The 24-bar fragment Mahler left of a scherzo to follow this movement became fodder for the febrile imagination of Russian composer Alfred Schnittke, when commissioned in 1988 to use it somehow to create a companion piece to the completed movement. With only the semblance of a between-movement pause, the quartet proceeded to this six-minute Quartet, which took a motif from Mahler’s fragment and sent it to the Hall of Mirrors at the fun house, stretching, squashing and refracting it, not without considerable technical virtuosity and contrapuntal legerdemain, in high ghoulish Schnittke style. After a great dissonant climax, Schnittke calmly sets out Mahler’s 24 bars, presumably much slowed down, unless it was also Mahler’s intention to write an adagio scherzo. There followed a woozy few chords for coda that Katz, in his introduction perhaps unguardedly called “after the lobotomy.” Again, the performances were, or appeared to be (since we haven’t heard this piece before) completely spot-on.

The first half of the program closed in a much more genial vein with the Nonet in F Major, op. 31, of Ludwig a/k/a Louis Spohr (1784-1859). Once a towering figure (in 1885 W.S. Gilbert had the eponymous character in The Mikado admonish that music-hall singers be required to attend “… a series/Of masses and fugues and ‘ops’/By Bach, interwoven/With Spohr and Beethoven/At classical Monday Pops”—exalted company indeed), he wrote in all genres, is noted as an early developer of Romantic opera along with his contemporary Weber, and was a prodigious violin virtuoso. Some of his 18 concertos remain in repertory, as do his four well-regarded clarinet concertos. He further committed ten symphonies, 36 string quartets, one of the first post-Schumann piano quintets (a very good one), and, well, you get the idea.

His Nonet for wind quintet, string trio, and contrabass sits perfectly on the cusp between Classical and Romantic idioms. Its opening movement takes a little motif and snakes it around all the instruments, for which he writes idiomatically with grace and flair. The other three movements are all equally charming, especially the slow movement’s extended antiphonal dialogue between winds and strings. It is music that smiles and, as someone once said of Chadwick, sometimes winks. There are Haydnesque pauses in the finale that raise involuntary chuckles of appreciation. We overheard one audience member grumble that such lightness didn’t belong on a program with Mahler and Brahms, but let’s face it, a diet so unrelentingly heavy can induce indigestion. So we say, hooray for Spohr. The performance, again, could not have been better, from Chapman, Murrath, Natasha Brofsky, cello and Donald Palma, contrabass (the latter two also NEC faculty), flutist Julie Scolnik, and BSO wind players Robert Sheena, oboe, Michael Wayne, clarinet, Suzanne Nelsen, bassoon, and James Sommervile, horn.

One might be tempted to think of Brahms’s Piano Quintet in F minor, op. 34, with a second cello instead of the piano as the “Music Minus One” version, but that was in fact how Brahms first wrote it. As recounted by Katz, when Brahms first heard it performed, he had misgivings and withdrew it, rewriting it as a two-piano sonata before Clara Schumann persuaded him to split the difference, as it were, by making it a piano quintet. English musician Sebastian Brown reconstructed the original version (Brahms destroyed it), but Finnish composer Anssi Karttunen thought he could do better, so at the request of the Jupiter String Quartet (Nelson Lee and Megan Freivogel, violins, Liz Freivogel, viola, and Daniel McDonough, cello) this was the version they performed with Katz.

You all know the Brahms Piano Quintet, right? If not, go have a listen, as we’re not going to describe the music. (For our money, you can’t do better than Sir Clifford Curzon with the Budapest Quartet.) We’ll wait….

Now, we don’t know just how Brahms scored that string quintet, but the Karttunen version has many virtues that, while not likely to blow away the piano version, have their own attractions. For one thing, the strings’ liberation from the piano’s dominant sonority permits access to the intricacies and genius of Brahms’s interior lines and enables one to parse the work’s form more clearly. The danger of this scoring, which the arranger and performers largely avoided, is a bottom-heaviness that is unmitigated by the separate piano timbre. In particular, the opening of the slow movement, always a glorious moment, is especially affecting without the piano. The only place we really missed the keyboard sound was in the scherzo; the finale, as rendered by the strings, had an almost gemütlich feel at times, but mostly the performance was as high-intensity as one could imagine. Everyone played as if they had something to prove, and they made their case convincingly: it was all claps on the back as they made their way offstage for their multiple curtain calls. We’re not aware of any recordings of the Karttunen arrangement (there is at least one of the Brown), but if these folks produce one, it would be well worth the quarter-inch of shelf space alongside your favorite renditions of the piano version.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

We had not previously been to this venue, although it has been used for music programs for a number of years. The hall is, we surmise, a dining and reception facility in normal use and is a rather vast space. As neither the floor nor the performers’ area is elevated, sight lines must not have been very good for anyone past the first few rows, and for a larger ensemble we would worry about excessive reverberation. We don’t know how long the temple has been running its concert series, but we note with some concern the absence of program notes (they did print performer bios), which would probably have enhanced the experience of an audience that would likely be unfamiliar with the repertoire on offer.

With these preliminaries aside, we can report on the substance of the program. The duo began with Beethoven’s Sonata No. 4 in C Major, op. 102 No. 1. In the world of Beethoven cello sonatas, the “biggies” are No. 3 and No. 5 (out of five total). Numbers 4 and 5 were published together in 1817, having been written two years earlier. The big fugal Finale of No. 5 has made it the more popular of the two, which are early examples of Beethoven’s late period. No. 4 is also an example of Beethoven’s more mercurial expressive output and features a somewhat unusual formal layout. Although listed in the program for this concert as comprising four movements, in reality it only has two (to judge from where the double bar lines are in the score). Two long slow introductions, almost movement-length, introduce two fast ones (which means that all the sections are at least nominally in C), but the latter are full of starts and stops.Müller-Szeraws put forth a full, plummy tone, with well controlled vibrato and a lively saltando bowing when called upon, on what we are told is a phenomenally wonderful instrument lent by the Cohens. It certainly is a beautiful one, but with well controlled vibrato and a lively saltando bowing when called upon. Müller-Szeraws also leaned deeply into the low tones of the second-movement introduction, producing a crunchily grainy effect that favored Beethoven’s highly varied textures. Urrutia-Borlando labored under something of a disability, though: Temple Emanuel’s undersized Petrof parlor grand had a rather hollow bass and a somewhat raw sound overall. The performance, too, was technically skillful but lacking in suavity to match the cellist’s and at points overwhelmed him in volume.

Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata in d minor, op. 40, his only foray in the medium (the under-edited program put the “No. 4” here instead of with the Beethoven), was a product of his earlier days, written in 1934. It was not, however, a sunny snook-cocking exercise like his first piano concerto, but a very dappled affair mixing tunefulness with great pathos. (There was much ado in the Shostakovich household at the time, though one should not oversell the connection between life and art.) In their performance, the duo deserves considerable praise; their conception was sound, striking the right balance and presenting Shostakovich’s ideas with clarity and sympathy. Müller-Szeraws was expressively sublime in the great lyrical second theme of the first movement (though there was a finger-slip or two), and Urrutia-Borlando was wonderfully deep and mysterious in the repeated, characteristic A-Ds at the close of the movement. The imbalance between piano and cello persisted, however, especially in the second movement, a typically wild scherzo, where the former engulfed the latter’s delicate harmonics. There was perfect balance, however, and pure beauty in the songful, soulful slow movement, while their slightly slower-than-usual opening tempo for the finale put a sinister cast on the superficially simple theme.

In an interesting programming decision, the duo followed intermission with the brief Romance in A Major, op. 69, by Gabriel Fauré. It’s a lovely but slight work, occasionally showing the composer’s penchant for unusual cadential harmonies. It got a suitably mellifluous performance, but we thought this would have been a better encore piece than something for the main program.

The final work was Myaskovsky’s Cello Sonata No. 2 in a minor, op. 81. Myaskovsky (1881-1950, not 1959 as per the program) was, on the one hand, the pupil of Lyadov and Rimsky-Korsakov and classmate and friend of the decade-younger Prokofiev, and on the other one of the enthusiastic early adopters of Socialist Realism after the Russian Revolution. He is regarded as “father of the Soviet symphony,” having written a full twenty-seven of them, along with thirteen string quartets. All this faithfulness (he won the Stalin Prize a record-holding six times) did not, in the end, protect him from the vicissitudes of Soviet cultural policy. Like Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Khachaturian, Myaskovsky was condemned for “bourgeois formalism”; but whereas the others on Zhdanov’s “little list” showed dangerously modernist tendencies, Myaskovsky’s crimes were the opposite. Thus, the Sonata No. 2, written in 1948 and dedicated to Rostropovich, betrays no hint that it was written in the 20th century. This, from a contemporary of Bartók and Stravinsky. Even the apparatchik Tikhon Khrennikov used a more overtly modernist idiom! One can, indeed, imagine the émigrés from the ancien regime listening to this music in their Paris parlors, weeping over past glory. Curiously, for a student of Rimsky, there is precious little identifiably Russian about it, either. It is, nevertheless, graceful, melodious, soulful and mellow, and quite well built. The second theme of the finale is somewhat startling; it seems like a foreshadowing of the great quintet that ends Barber’s Vanessa, written nearly a decade later. One can take its chronology and use it as an ironic framing device, the way one must with the late works of Easley Blackwood. Müller-Szeraws and Urrutia-Borlando made of it a fine showpiece, extracting from it a full measure of sentiment and, as occasionally necessary in the finale, bravura.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

For starters, there were two short pieces by Schreker (1878-1934), who, in the early 20^th century, was considered Strauss’s rival as the greatest living German-language opera composer. NECCO performed the Intermezzo, op. 8, from 1900 and the unpublished Scherzo of about the same time, both of which were early works, probably written as competition pieces (the Intermezzo was a winner, quite justifiably), and which, perhaps, were tailored to the generally conservative tastes of the Viennese public and academia, most notably Fuchs, who was on the award jury. Nevertheless, both pieces are well made and highly agreeable. The former is gentle and pastoral in feeling, with some chromatic twists in the inner voices; the latter, in duple meter, has some rustic and nature-loving allusions not unlike those of Mahler’s First Symphony, but of course with a high Viennese polish applied. The conductorless strings (the entire program was strings-only) of NECCO, with Jennifer Wey as leader for these pieces, were unimpeachable in balance, tone, intonation, expression and synchronicity.

Fuchs (1847-1927) was teacher to the stars, one might say, of fin du siècle central Europe: Mahler, Wolf, Zemlinsky, Schreker, Sibelius, Enescu, and Korngold among them. His own music, greatly sought after by the public but scarcely promoted by him, earned consistent praise from that toughest of tough graders, Johannes Brahms.  He wrote five serenades, earning him the nickname “the serenading fox,” of which NECCO performed Serenade No. 2 in C major, from 1876 (the same year, incidentally, as Brahms’s First Symphony). In four movements that grew progressively more involved and deep, it was a winning exercise in faux-naïveté. The slow movement is especially affecting, as shadows fall on the scene; the Scherzo, if such it is, is unusually vehement in a minor key, while the finale is a frenzied Galop, sort of a Schubert Great C Major Lite. The performance, led this time by Robyn Bollinger, was virtuosic; we commend the limpidity of line and the lightness of touch, even in the most furious passages.

After intermission came another serenade, this time by the true outlier on the program. Josef Suk (1874-1935, not to be confused with his grandson the famous violinist) did not study with Fuchs, but with his (Suk’s) future father-in-law, Antonín Dvorák, from whom he derived his earliest musical influences. We presume that Suk’s Serenade for String Orchestra in E-flat, op. 6, was included as a nod to Mahler’s birth in Bohemia, although there was never any Czech flavor to Mahler’s writing. Suk’s maturer work would develop a decidedly more chromatic and Mahlerian tone; this Serenade, though, written at Dvorák’s instigation in 1892, was well worth hearing. While certain of its sounds correspond to what one thinks of as an Eastern European vernacular, there were some individual and distinctive touches. We noticed a much thicker string texture in this work than in either the Fuchs or, for that matter, the Schreker. At the same time, alone among the works on this program, the Suk provided opportunities for soloists to emerge from the ensemble. While all the solo work was beautifully played (by the leader, Quan Yuan, the principal second violin, Grace Park, and the violist Derek Mosloff—one small cavil about better projection aside), we must single out the cellist, Caleb van der Swaagh for his stunning solo in the glorious slow movement. This Serenade does have a commercial recording extant, but it deserves to be more widely heard. A violinist friend remarked that its use of E-flat as the tonic enables a dark, rich sound unavailable with the brighter open strings in the more usual string keys of D, G and A. This was definitely the case in the Presto finale, which added emotional depth uncharacteristic of this type of work to the sonic depth inherent in the key relationships.

Although it would normally be considered sub-optimal programming to follow such a rousing work as the Suk with a slow closer, there were no objections in this case to the Langsamer Satz (slow movement) by Anton von Webern (as he still called himself in 1905). Written for string quartet as a student exercise for his teacher, the ardent Mahlerophile Arnold Schoenberg, and played here in a very effective string orchestra version by the eminent conductor Gerard Schwarz, this is about as un-Webernish a piece as one is likely to hear from him. It was, however, by far the most Mahlerish (and, dare we say, malerisch) work on the program. It features an almost unthinkable (for Webern) long-breathed melody—whose opening motif, alas, we couldn’t avoid hearing as “If You Go In” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe (somehow we doubt any influence of Sullivan on Webern). Since this is Webern, though, a listener can’t help trying to detect adumbrations of the composer’s mature style. They were there, including a preoccupation with delicate pizzicati and other individualistic points of articulation, though almost entirely in the background. The climax, too, begins with a big unison and intensifies with octave displacements in the melody—but, after all, this is just as characteristic of Mahler; think of the Tenth Symphony. As they were throughout the concert, the NECCO players (the leader for the Webern was Kobi Malkin) were impeccable and utterly professional in sound and musicianship. Their coach, Donald Palma, received a proper share of the copious applause.

Every generation of students going through our leading music schools, it would seem, surpasses its predecessor in chops and finesse. With even major orchestras wobbling and falling left and right, one is left to wonder where all this talent and training is going to find outlets worthy of its pedigree.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

Janácek’s suite for wind sextet (standard wind quintet plus bass clarinet), entitled Mladi (“Youth”), is a piece that ought to be, but isn’t, programmatic. Of its four movements the outer ones feature a motif that, according to Steven Ledbetter’s program note, sounds out the Czech words for “youth, golden youth,” with the music of the finale developing the motif in a tone of wistful nostalgia. (On a side note, it’s worth mentioning that Mladi was written when its composer was seventy.) The addition of the bass clarinet provided a solid foundation to alleviate the chirpiness that often afflicts the sound of a wind quintet; here, as performed by Craig Nordstrom, joining his BSO colleagues Elizabeth Rowe, flute, John Ferrillo, oboe, William R. Hudgins, clarinet, James Sommerville, horn, and Richard Svoboda, bassoon, that grounding was amply in evidence. In the opening of the second movement, the duet between Nordstrom and Svoboda achieved a magical blending of timbres. Each of the performers had opportunities to shine in this piece, and they took full advantage: Sommerville in the first movement, Ferrillo in the second, and Rowe in the third, notably delicate and un-strident on the piccolo. Technically speaking, this was about as good a performance as one could hope to hear; the only element occasionally missing was a certain sparkle and sharpness of attack.

A much rarer bird than Mladi, Martinu’s Sextet for Piano and Winds followed. The Sextet was written only five years later than the Janácek, in 1929, but inhabits an entirely different musical world. The composer, having left his native Policka for Paris in 1923, continued his studies there with Albert Roussel and absorbed the fresh sounds generated by Les Six—and that naughty jazz stuff from America. In spirit, Martinu’s Sextet shares a lot with Poulenc’s sextet for piano and wind quintet, though Martin? dispensed with the French horn and substituted an extra bassoon, played on Sunday by Suzanne Nelsen. In sound, however, Martinu’s work is much more heavily influenced by American jazz—or at least how Parisians thought of it (playing blues in 6/8 is not exactly swing). The first of the five movements was a Praeludium with jazzy piano riffs as well as dollops of Ravel, a soupcon of Poulenc, a suggestion of ragtime, and an incongruously neo-Baroque close. A suave and stately slow movement with lots of “white key” dissonance followed; then two movements marked Divertimento, the first a fleet and jazzy duet between flute and piano, the second a highly refracted attempt at blues—more Czech-sounding than the other movements despite a clear tip of the hat to Gershwin. The piece ended with a fugally active finale. Again, the performances—by Rowe, Ferrillo, Hudgins, Svoboda and Nelsen, joined by BSO staff pianist Vytas Baksys—were technically flawless (Rowe and Baksys were superb in their duet); yet with the consistent exception of Baksys, who dove into his part with sympathetic gusto, it was only sporadically that we got the youthful thrill that Martinu evidently intended.

After intermission a complete change of dramatis personae brought out the strings of the ensemble—Malcolm Lowe and Haldan Martinson, violins, Steven Ansell, viola, Jules Eskin, cello, and Edwin Barker, bass. They assembled for Dvorák’s Quintet in G, misleadingly given the opus number 77 by its publisher, but accounted for as op. 18 by the composer. As with the Janácek, the addition of a low extension gave the work more sonic elbow-room, of which Barker took full advantage in the first movement, sometimes at the expense of Lowe and Martinson. In general, though, the ensemble balanced its sound nicely. In the congenial acoustic of Jordan Hall, the bass sound worked its way into the head in the best possible way, while the members of the string quartet (especially the cello, freed from its anchor responsibilities) carried their lines with admirable equipoise. As to the rest of the performance, especially noteworthy was Lowe’s dolcississimo turn in the slow movement. However, we got the sense that the performers were playing it safe—no breakout moments, no edginess anywhere. This approach must reap its rewards, though: of the three pieces performed, only the Dvorák brought listeners to their feet during the applause.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

We were slightly taken aback (but nevertheless mostly delighted) at the matter-of-factness with which the concert was conducted: no audience warm-up; no greetings; no acknowledgments, fundraising or oral program notes; not even (this might have been, but luckily wasn’t, problematic) the admonition to turn off one’s phone—the concert just began. What it began with, on a stage totally bare but for a music stand, was Valentin Silvestrov’s Homage to J.S. Bach, written in 2002, for violin—and offstage piano. The brief work was largely a meditation on the famous Chaconne in d minor from Bach’s second violin partita, BWV 1004, broken into jagged fragments that were then, so to speak, turned around in the hand for inspection before gradually being softened and joined back together. There was a middle section of vaguely Viennese salon music of whose aesthetic purpose we were not entirely sure—it might have been a nostalgic invocation of music-making at home; it might have been a sardonic contrast between real music and kitsch. Sonically, the meditation was enhanced by having the piano played (presumably by the occulted Mr. Zlabys) from offstage: it provided ghostly resonance to the notes of the chaconne and a far-away dreaminess to the salon music. At the conclusion, the violin’s quiet pizzicato and the piano’s echoes become indistinguishable from one another, a well-done effect.

Kremer didn’t even give the audience a chance to gather its wits for applause before launching into that on which the Silvestrov commented (an almost Ivesian touch: the working-out before the theme). Of course, there is plenty of both compositional and physical working out for the performer in the Chaconne. A good thing Kremer decided to play the Silvestrov before the Bach; it would have been a serious let-down had he done the reverse. Kremer’s playing in the Silvestrov seemed rather tentative, but the Bach was as bold as the other was pallid. It was not, perhaps, as careful a performance as it might have been, but Kremer thrilled the house with brilliant dynamic contrasts without any loss of tension or momentum, as well as his monumental, architectural conception of the piece.

The first part of the program ended with the first of two works by Sofia Gubaidulina, Rejoice—Sonata for Violin and Cello (1981). Kremer has recorded this with Yo-Yo Ma, and is a staunch advocate of her deeply spiritual music. We will focus on this work partly because of its and its composer’s relative scarcity on Boston stages, partly simply because of its merit. Rejoice was in four movements, though by our count it seemed like five. (Would it have hurt to put the movements and their titles in the program?) The brief first movement, Your joy no one will take away from you, set the tone for the whole as being a work in which articulations count at least as much as notes. It set up a dialogue in ordinary articulation and harmonics, beginning with the violin. Not all of Kremer’s harmonics produced clean sounds—possibly they were double-stops, we couldn’t see—but others were intensely resonant, like Franklin’s tuned glasses. The cello’s entrance brought a contrasting idea, mostly in glissandi, and a silvery continuation of the violin harmonics before the conclusion.

The second movement, Rejoice with joy, was a sort of scherzo in a marked triple meter, with twining chromatic figures and strands of melody like a descant. A long slow movement (Rejoice Ravvi) followed, full of keening in the upper reaches of the cello, growls in the lower, harmonics in both instruments and misterioso tremolo sul ponticello. All of this seemed structural, but repeated hearings seem necessary to put these elements in place (the Kremer-Ma recording is on Spotify). Eventually there was a concord of a sort, with both instruments in sync. What we originally thought was another movement presented a predominance of soft harmonics, a sort of Martian hymnody that gradually came closer to earth—all to stunning effect. The finale, Heed thyself, was a surprise, beginning with a vehement scherzo in mock-Shostakovich style, which continued in the violin while the cello adopted a broader, more lyrical tone and continued in a soulful monologue. The piece faded out in quiet spiccato.

This is powerful, intense, and deeply-felt music that bears repeated listening. Kremer and Dirvanauskaite gave a powerful, intense, and deeply-felt performance that had plainly been subject to much thought and preparation—well worth the price of admission.

After intermission, more Gubaidulina of a very different sort: her much earlier Chaconne for Piano Solo (1962), the theme being a noisy sequence of chords with motivic nods to the Baroque. The variations explored the extremes of the instrument’s register, dynamics, and texture, with what seemed like the occasional tip of the hat to Prokofiev and Shostakovich (an influential mentor to Gubaidulina), especially the B-flat minor prelude in chaconne form from the latter’s op. 87. It was, nevertheless, a musically slighter work than the duo sonata. Zlabys, a man with hands to rival jackhammers, was duly impressive in technique and power, with admirable clarity of line when called for.

Which brings us to the closing work on the program, Shostakovich’s epochal Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, op. 67. We have had the pleasure of hearing this great work recently in a stellar performance described here. Having therefore no need to repeat the general discussion of the piece, we can cut to the chase and observe that, as eminent a performer as Kremer is, and as obviously talented and technically secure are Dirvanauskaite and Zlabys, their performance seldom rose to the interpretive levels we experienced a few weeks ago. Our sense is that these fine players spent most of their rehearsal on Gubaidulina and trusted to their skill and probable familiarity with the Shostakovich to carry them through, a plan which unfortunately did not succeed. We found the first movement overbalanced toward the piano, the second movement insufficiently mordant in the outer sections. The third movement chaconne (do we detect a unifying theme here?) was the best, and stirringly conveyed. The finale we found bizarre at first, the opening tunes stiff and stilted; if there was an intentional concept behind that, the players should lose it. The movement did finally come together at the end of the development, just before the return of the first movement’s main theme, and continued in a strong manner to the end—though our overall impression by then had been rather soured.

For the record, the trio performed an encore, a chromatically inflected late 19^th-century work with which we were unfamiliar, and whose identity the performers did not see fit to disclose; interesting, if a bit out of step with the rest of the program.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

BMV presented an item from its very first season, the chamber arrangement of Lukas Foss’s Time Cycle, as well as the premiere of a David Rakowski piece, and two other works from this century, a string trio by Mark Berger and a flute-clarinet duo by David Froom. The title Music Director Richard Pittman gave to the program was “Time Cycles,” pointing to a theme that carried from the Foss to most of the other works on the program.

The program began with String Trio No. 2 by Mark Berger, perhaps best known locally as a violist, but a composer of considerable accomplishment as well. This trio, written in 2007 for Music at Eden’s Edge, a North Shore series on which Berger often performs, was inspired by the poem The Dry Salvages by T.S. Eliot, the third of his Four Quartets. The title (the third word pronounced, according to the poet, to rhyme with “assuages”) refers to a lighthouse-bearing rock outcropping in Gloucester, where Eliot’s family had a summer home. Thus, the North Shore connection was a natural tie-in to MEE, but for purposes of the BMV program one had to dig deeper. The poem’s burden is one of time: Eliot’s reflections on his childhood (there are also references to his native St. Louis), one’s place in relation to the past, and how the dry materialism of his rejected Yankee Unitarian heritage stood in the way of what he saw as a right relation to the past.

Berger’s trio intersperses between the “regular” four movements three very brief interludes, each of the seven total sections bearing a heading taken from the poem. In pre-performance remarks, the composer said he was no Eliot scholar, and his approach to the piece would seem to bear him out: the opening movement was largely pictorial, with a craggy opening and gentler afterthoughts, a Debussy-like interplay of rocks and waves; in the first interlude, we could hear the fog coming in on little cat fifths. Some of the music was very attractive to listen to; as a string player himself, Berger is adept at calling forth a range of articulations; his use of harmonics and sharp pizzicati are very effective, though with many movements rather short (the second interlude gnomic in the extreme), it was sometimes hard to sense their structural significance. The third and fourth movements (fifth and seventh sections) were more fully realized and yielded some very gratifying moments, such as an extended pizzicato dialogue (trilogue?). The last movement contained the only fast music, slowing eventually to accommodate reminiscences from the earlier ones and an attempt to invoke bells described in the poem (not easy to do with strings, unless you try for pizzicato harmonics, which from personal experience we can tell you that string players stoutly resist). Still, despite its somewhat oblique relation to the meat of Eliot’s poem, this was a decent piece of work, worth hearing. The very able performers, Bayla Keyes, violin, Peter Sulski, viola, and Jan Müller-Szeraws, cello, put considerable backbone into their reading, though there was occasional wan execution of the harmonics.

The first half of the program ended with the premiere of David Rakowski’s Thickly Settled for clarinet (William Kirkley), violin (Keyes), cello (Müller-Szeraws) and piano (Geoffrey Burleson), which Pittman informed the audience is the third work BMV has commissioned from Rakowski. The title, derived from those road signs one sees on rural roads to warn of impending hamlets, turns out to have little to nothing to do with the piece. Rakowski’s is one of the rare genial musical personalities (his hilarious riposte to all manner of compositional orthodoxies can be seen here) and this three-movement quartet is something of a devil-may-care romp whose first movement opens in a cloud of dust that gradually settles into a melodic line that drives through a jazzy stretch before a lyrical close. A slow, very self-consciously lyric and beautiful movement follows, in which Rakowski gives the piano a somewhat incongruous accompaniment entirely played directly on the piano’s strings.

“Pianists hate that,” Rakowski said, with a big smile, in his introduction  — for which reason, as Burleson told us later, BU sternly refused permission to use Tsai’s regular concert grand. Those party-poopers! The finale, which Rakowski described as a scherzo, sets up a toccata-like driving rhythm against which the violin descants with a slow-moving tune. The movement segues to a slower “trio”; then, just a few seconds after resuming the opening section, it all just stops. La commedia è finita. A charming, well-built piece in a loose-limbed way. The performance, conducted by Pittman, seemed perfectly together. Each player contributed passages of distinguished finesse and the ensemble seemed to be chugging contentedly. Even Burleson smiled.

The second half opened with a short three-movement work for flute (Ann Bobo) and clarinet (Kirkley), “Circling,” written in 2002 by David Froom. The composer, who also introduced his work, described his objective as taking these two instruments that are often called upon to blend sonorities, and play with the ways this can be made to happen or, as in the first movement, not happen. In the first movement, called “Tête-à-tête,” the main technique seems to have been to have the instruments sort of bark at each other in dissonant counterpoint rather than to explore those ranges of the instruments (e.g., the chalumeau register of the clarinet) that are least like each other. The second movement, “Pas de deux,” winds the two players’ lines tightly around one another in a kind of coital coil —mostly consonance here, so it must be love. The finale, “Duettino,” tries to create what the composer called a single mega-instrument, a “flutinet,” in which the instruments don’t play in unison but often complete each other’s thoughts and mostly keep within close range of one another. While impeccably constructed, this appeared the musically slightest of the four pieces on the program, but Bobo and Kirkley were solid in technique and closely synched in rhythm and phrasing.

About the title work on the program, Foss’s seminal 1960 song cycle, here sung by Jennifer Ashe, soprano, with Kirkley, Müller-Szeraws, Burleson and Jonatahan Hess, percussion, under Pittman’s direction, we have previously given some background <here>.  It struck us yet again about this piece that in setting his native German, Foss was more given to lyrical expression — even in the pattery recitations of the psychotic Kafka diary entry that constitutes the third song — than in the jagged dissociative music for the English texts from Auden and Housman. The final poem, from Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, is Mahlerian in affect, obsessing as it must on the “Ewigkeit” ending, so much like Das Lied von der Erde.

As for the performances, Ashe has a lovely voice, whose wide range of tone as well as pitch packs quite a wallop, especially for one of her slight stature. She makes a specialty of modernist-and-later music, so does it as well as anyone, and brings great dramatic sensibility to her performances, but it must be said that the disjointed lines such as appear in the first two songs are not calculated to bring out the best in a singer’s voice; such are the trade-offs composers make. In the finale, we hung enraptured on every note. Her diction (our publisher would prefer us to say enunciation, but this is music, not declamation) was not, however, up to the same standard, in German or English. Pittman ran a tight ship with the instrumental ensemble, and was exhilaratingly effective with Hess in the clockwork passages of the Auden setting; the Nietzschian finale glowed in its static splendor, from all the performers.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

The program for Messrs. Berman, Morgenstern and Akahoshi was a short but potent one: Edward Steuermann’s arrangement for piano trio of Arnold Schoenberg’s tone poem Verklärte Nacht, originally written for string sextet and often done by string orchestras, and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, op. 67. The Schoenberg, written in 1899 and first performed in 1902, has long been regarded as the ne plus ultra of chromatic tonal harmony, whose use at one point of an academically forbidden inverted ninth chord got it banned from consideration for an award. (No kidding: this kind of thing really happened back then! academics would of course never condition advancement on adherence to current orthodoxy any more.) Truth to tell, Schoenberg’s harmonic idiom in this piece seems more firmly grounded than in many a seasickness-inducing Reger work we have encountered. Verklärte Nacht interprets a poem by the then fashionably bohemian Richard Dehmel; it tells of a woman’s anguish that the baby she is carrying is not her lover’s (nobody in those earnest fin de siècle days thought it hilarious that the tragedy was that the baby was actually her husband’s.) The lover’s beatific assurances that his love would transform the baby into his own thus transfigure the night from broody D minor with gnashing chromatic excursions and inflections into a moon and star-lit D major. It’s actually very good music.

Steuermann, a great pianist and close friend of the composer—he performed the premieres of both Pierrot Lunaire and the Piano Concerto—sensed the dramatic rightness of having two solo strings act as if they were the protagonists in this drama and transferring the other string parts to a sensitive piano accompaniment. Berman perfectly matched his touch and dynamics to this role, more often than not holding back from what could otherwise have been a domineering presence. The ensemble took the slow introduction rather more slowly than we are accustomed to hear, but that was OK. Morgenstern and Akahoshi were full of passionate intensity and, where needed, angelic sweetness, with fat, powerful New Yorky projection. The transition from the first, broody part to the second—accomplished by Schoenberg’s treating E-flat minor as a Neapolitan relation to D major—was as radiant in this ensemble’s hands as one could hope for. The only miscalculation, which might have been Steuermann’s, was in muting certain passages for violin, which then didn’t carry over the piano and un-muted cello. This one problem was more than compensated by numerous brilliant details of execution.

Without intermission, or even an exit from the stage, the trio proceeded from the self-induced Art Nouveau agonies of the late 19-th century to the very real horrors of the mid 20th, in Shostakovich’s monumental second piano trio. This work responded both to larger and personal sadnesses: the revelation, as World War II wound to its end, of what had transpired in the Nazi death camps, and the mysterious sudden and premature death of the composer’s close friend, Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinsky, music director of the Leningrad Philharmonic, whose influence on Shostakovich had garnered both the enmity of the Soviet political and musical Apparat. This trio, dedicated to Sollertinsky’s memory, was the first of several Shostakovich works to involve elements of Jewish music, in this case in a finale largely based on Jewish klezmer-type folk music. The reference to Sollertinsky in this is not necessarily direct—it’s not clear that Sollertinsky was Jewish—but both men had an interest in Jewish music for its almost unique alternation and blending of happy and sad elements in the same gesture, and in the composer’s case as a metaphor for all victims of persecution.

The Trio No. 2 is a perfect example of Shostakovich’s ability to portray extreme emotional states within an Apollonian formal structure. It begins with a slow introduction in an eerie passage for the cello in harmonics. Akahoshi’s playing was so powerfully assured that it almost undercut the music’s otherworldly spookiness. The ensemble preserved the chilling effect, however, even as the faster music of the compact sonata-form first movement began. Morgenstern was especially splendid here in his articulations and nimble dynamic shifts, while Berman was also fleet, delicate and powerful, as the occasion demanded. The second-movement scherzo was, according to Sollertinsky’s widow, a sharply etched portrait of the man, with gruffness, grotesquerie and a slightly insane jollity admixed. The slow movement is a passacaglia, introduced by Berman in monumental chords as solid as the Great Gate of Kiev. The strings here were stately, gradually becoming ghostly and melancholy. The finale began with superbly crisp pizzicati from Morgenstern, again in a tempo a bit slower than standard, but fully justified in lending added heft to the many repetitions of one characteristic four-note phrase. From about two-thirds of the way through until the end, the Jewish tunes are joined by reminiscences from the earlier movements, an effect far in expressive intent from the ritual cyclicality that had become a tic of late 19-th century writing, and here allow the universalizing of the ethnic references into a grand and unified artistic and social statement. The ensemble captured this brilliantly, in what was one of the finest performances of this noble work we have ever heard.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

The program began with Fine’s Fantasia for String Trio, a late work dating from 1956. (The composer’s life and work were prematurely cut off by a heart attack at age 47 in 1962). Long associated with neoclassicism, Fine chose dodecaphony, according to Stepner’s pre-concert oral program notes, as a means to break away from “the Boston neoclassical fold”; although with  the style’s having lost Stravinsky and Arthur Berger to serialism some time earlier and even eventually Aaron Copland and Walter Piston, Fine’s transition seems now to be more a matter of persuading himself that the trending thing was suitable for him than a lone cry of artistic independence. Be that as it may, Fine’s Fantasia — a three-movement affair in closely connected sections — is one of the most attractive serial works we know of, integrating Fine’s typically soft-edged sound into the serial mix. Its tempo structure is slow-fast-slow, with relatively brief outer movements surrounding a ruggedly fleet and substantial scherzo. The slow movements are deliberate, sober and lyrical; Stepner assessed the close of the finale as betraying bitterness, but — at least as performed by the Lydian trio — struck us more like a sigh of resignation. To what, we have no idea; unlike Mahler and Finzi, Fine’s end was not long foretold. The ensemble was operating in top form throughout, with everyone in firm control of technique and dynamics and keeping textures splendidly clear.

There followed another not-that-frequently performed work (in fact, the entire program consisted of pieces falling into that category, a tendency of which we approve heartily), the Sonata for Violin and Cello by Maurice Ravel. This piece gave Ravel much more trouble than its small forces would suggest. It took him nearly two years to finish; its first movement appeared in 1920 as part of a tribute to the recently deceased Debussy, but the rest of its four movements didn’t gel until 1922. Part of the delay may be explained by Ravel’s creative block following the trauma of World War I, in which he, like his sometime pupil Vaughan Williams, served as an ambulance driver. Another related cause might be the work’s content, which can be read as a reflection on the war. Never one to wear his heart on his sleeve, Ravel permitted himself, as he did in La Valse the year he began the sonata, to express bitter vituperation against militarism (especially in the mocking military flourishes in the finale, similar in affect to Rebecca Clarke’s piano trio) and the vapid and self-absorbed societies that slouched toward war, notably in the satirical invocation of grand nineteenth-century virtuoso styles that infect the savage second-movement scherzo. Stepner and Gordon have this work a technically superb reading, though we have heard recorded performances — we have not previously heard it live — that nailed this context better, for example by holding back the tempo of the first movement to draw out the contrast between its elegant lines and the histrionics of the second. We also found some fault in insufficient contrast between speaking and accompanying voices in the first movement. Otherwise, both performers swept through this work’s many technical nettles with gratifying aplomb.

The official title of this concert was “Music for 2, 3, and 4,” but the counting should have begun at one, since after intermission Chuang returned the program to the subject of Irving Fine with three short piano solos, the first, Hommage à Mozart, a delightful and elegant exercise in wrong-note neoclassicism. We’re not sure whether Fine had some particular Mozart work or works in mind, but this was a gentle 6/8 number of endearing sweetness. The last two pieces were taken from Fine’s Diversions for piano, the first a surprisingly perky “Koko’s Lullabye” and the closer an off-kilter, bitonal “Flamingo Polka,” a satirical romp reminiscent of Shostakovich’s polka from The Age of Gold, but referring more to the Pittsburgh branch of the polka family than the European one. Chuang was not often required by this music to exhibit great power, except in the polka where she delivered the needful, but she applied exquisite delicacy and finesse and superb dynamic control that could shade a single run with three or four distinct hues.

All the available forces joined to close the program with the second, the less-heard of Fauré’s two piano quartets, his Quartet in G minor, op. 45. This piece was a bit off Fauré’s beaten path compositionally because of its greater use of cyclic form than most of the composer’s oeuvre, and in that it has passages of considerable vigor and force, particularly in the scherzo and finale, as well as parts of the opening Allegro molto moderato, along with his more typically languid, ruminative ones. We found the performers a bit tentative in much of the first movement, giving a somewhat laid-back reading until the recapitulation, which picked up steam through the coda before the movement’s soft landing. The Scherzo was an instrumental tour-de-force that all the performers seemed to relish and thrive on, especially Chuang. Their dynamics were very well judged overall. The slow movement, which sits in serene isolation from the melodically linked other movements, highlighted what is a constant feature of the piece in general, a strong melodic interest in the viola, to which Ray applied a rich and plummy sound. The movement’s many longueurs began to wear on us, relieved by several instances of striking harmonic imagination. The finale, as mentioned, was brisk and infectious; the ensemble again showed superior group savvy in its rhythmic cohesion and dynamic control.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

The Beethoven String Trio No. 5 in C minor, op. 9 No. 3, shows the composer staking out territory he was to occupy for the rest of his life: one item being his obsession with C minor as the key for stern, serious, high-minded music; another, the emotional content that stretches the capacity of classical form to contain; and a more particular one, the use of the space that had been reserved for a stately minuet to deliver powerful, angular, even grotesque sounds. The players in this instance, violinist Sunghae Anna Lim, violist Jonathan Vinocur, and cellist Natasha Brofsky, delivered a performance that, while not overpowering in volume or projection, was well balanced, refined and very well planned in dynamics, and fully persuasive. Their many unisons and octave passages were not only perfectly together but also individually crafted for dynamics and expression. Lim’s delicate passagework adorned the slow movement, while all three contributed brilliance and bravura to the rhythmically and melodically jolting anti-minuet of the scherzo. The finale demonstrated superb high-energy bowing, especially in softer passages. (Their bowing during the applause was more dignified and restrained….)

Melinda Wagner’s Skritch (2010) for oboe and string quartet carries an enigmatic title that composer and retired Bowdoin College professor Elliott Schwartz, in his pre-concert walk-through of the program, sought — vainly, as it happened — to interpret. In an on-stage interview just before the work’s performance between the composer and the evening’s emcee, Maine Public Radio Music Director and  program host Suzanne Nance, Wagner said the title was applied after the piece was completed and was a quasi-nonsense word much favored by her late father, with vague connotations of low-level annoying noise or conduct. The work to which this title has been appended is in a single movement of five sections, beginning with a disjointed series of gestures in the strings — call them “skritchy” if you like — that the oboe picks up and domesticates, with meters and harmonics gradually smoothing out before a contrasting lyrical passage. The oboe (the estimable Peggy Pearson), although getting its share of solos, is not a concertante player here. Its character ranges from team player to provocateur, and sometimes these attributes alternate between oboe and strings. One gets the sense that the materials of all the sections — which touch all the bases, from slow and lyrical to scherzo-ish to assertive — are related, though below the surface. On the whole, the work struck us as ingratiating, but not profound. Pearson was careful to keep the oboe’s more garrulous qualities well under control. The ensemble, which besides Pearson comprised Lim and Elowitch, violins, Vinocur, viola, and Claire Bryant, cello, were clearly on top of the materials and made a strong case for the piece.

The second half of the program provided a radical sonic contrast to the first, by doing away with the strings and introducing a piano, for Francis Poulenc’s 1930s masterpiece, Sextet. Surprisingly, considering how much of a set ensemble a wind quintet is, there are very few works that add a piano to it, in contrast to the piano-plus-string-quartet quintet. The only examples we know of are by George Onslow, Ludwig Thuille (the one Brahms would have written had he written for wind ensembles), and Wallingford Riegger, none of whom are exactly household names these days. Between the Poulenc and the Thuille, which is quite popular with wind players, there could not be a greater contrast. While Thuille, perhaps uniquely among those who have essayed this medium, sought to use the piano as a matrix in which to blend the unique timbres of the winds, Poulenc, with his French love of wind sonorities, reveled in their dissimilarities and kept the piano part more or less in the background.

We describe the performance the Poulenc received Thursday as somewhat on the “wet” side: often glowing and rounded rather than biting and hard-edged. This was particularly true of hornist Theodore Primis, whose sound was lush and opulent, and his brother, bassoonist Damian Primis, enthralled with his first-movement solo that hung suspended in mid-air. The slow movement features one of Poulenc’s patented and cunning melodies, simple almost to banality but fraught with melancholy. Flutist Elizabeth Mann played this beautifully but reticently; Pearson, when it came her turn, rendered it to perfection. The finale is a gallimaufry (but a charming one) of snatches of rapidly changing character garnished with rhythmic punch and sudden whiffs of nostalgia, with which it concludes. Of the players not yet cited, we approve of clarinetist Todd Palmer’s tone and projection, though he once or twice seemed to forget he was part of a team. Pianist Dena Levine was, as we said, more of a background and linking presence than under a spotlight, but she held up her end gamely, assisted not at all by the muddy-sounding Steinway that it was her lot to confront.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

In any event, the two-plus hour trek to Putney gave us our first visit to this now 42-year-old series run as an adjunct to a summer chamber music school that has evolved from a retreat for the winter students of founders David and Janet Wells to a dedicated program with numerous faculty and students who apply to it. Its original eponymous performance space has also given way to a purpose-built venue in the modern barn vernacular style, seating about 120, with carefully crafted (but idiosyncratic —read on) acoustics and amenities such as comfortable padded seating and (a blessing on that scorcher of a day) air conditioning.

The program presented, if not what we originally anticipated, was an agreeably diverse one with much of interest. We have not previously encountered the work of Philippe Hersant (b. 1948), this year’s YB composer in residence. He was a student of André Jolivet at the Paris Conservatory and has adopted a stylistic approach that draws on Jolivet’s and Messiaen’s humanistic outlook rather than the pseudo-scientific sound technology of IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique). Hersant’s Tenebrae  for viola and piano (2005) begins with a swirling sfumato of arpeggiation against which the viola, sumptuously played by Pei-Ling Lin, intones a plaintive melody. The tune is not exactly varied, but it serves as the basis for a variety of excursions that keep returning to the original keening mood. Pianist Michael Bukhman combined delicacy and power, abetted by an especially sonorous Steinway whose lower notes filled the room. The piece left a strong impression and is definitely something to seek out, as well as other work by its composer.

Jonathan Harvey, nearly a decade older than Hersant, is a product of the generation from which arose Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. Like him, Harvey, who has spent his career mostly in academe, seems to have reacted strongly against the reticent conservatism and bucolia of earlier generations of British composers (a trend that has only intensified in later generations, despite the somewhat contrary motion of John Tavener, Judith Weir, and sometimes Thomas Adès). He has made the pilgrimage to IRCAM, but one individuating characteristic is his attraction to the more abstract connotations of religious concepts, using them to suggest compositional techniques.

Lotuses, a 1992 quartet for flute and string trio, opens with a shriek of dissonance that punctuates the work at several other points. The title, per the program note’s quotation from the composer, relates to the Buddhist significance of that flower, symbolizing “the rich individuality of forms of being.” The texture of the work thus emphasizes distinct sounds from the four instruments, from vaguely Japanese/Chinese microtonal pitch bending to drumming on the body of the cello. The melodic ideas are often quite simple and scalar, set in an atonal harmonic milieu. The flutist, the doughty and technically impeccable Ray Furuta, got to trot out his entire arsenal of equipment: piccolo and bass flute in addition to the regular one. There are many colorful and atmospheric touches in the music, from wide tremolos and delicate coordinated harmonics to the effects already mentioned. In fact, the piece started to sound like a compendium of effects rather than a sustained musical argument, which is probably not true, but we were not feeling generously inclined to seek it out for repeated exposure. The performers, all of whom were superb, were, in addition to Furuta, the estimable Curtis Macomber, violin and Margaret Dyer, viola, and Han Bin Yoon, cello.

The first half concluded with one of Robert Schumann’s oddest compositions, the C major Fantasie for violin and piano, op. 131 (Anthony Marwood and Bukhman). A product of Schumann’s last years and written originally for violin and orchestra for the young Joseph Joachim, it is a quirky bit of virtuoso flashiness that out-Florestans Florestan on Schumann’s manic side; it often conjured in our minds the fearsome technical fireworks and aesthetic shallowness of a Sarasate or Vieuxtemps. Schumann’s piano reduction does not disguise the work’s orchestral origins. It comes across as a sketch for the first movement of a violin concerto, cadenza and all, awaiting only the depth Schumann would ordinarily have woven in. Marwood threw off a big, vibrato-rich sound and a full-throated Romantic abandon, while not neglecting some delicate refinements such as a perfectly modulated spiccato. Bukhman matched Marwood’s ardor and mercurial mood swings. The performance brought the house down, as well it should; we only wish the work itself were better Schumann.

The post-intermission part of the concert consisted of Dvorák’s op. 77 (really op. 18) Quintet in G major for string quartet plus double bass (called Quintet No. 2, although his first — op. 1! — used an extra viola rather than the strikingly unusual bass). Written when the composer was thirty-four and still treading cautiously when moving from standard Germanic models to his more overtly nationalistic style, it nevertheless shows off many of Dvorák’s musical virtues, such as gorgeous melody, infectious rhythm, and strong developmental sense. It also has a few drawbacks, such as a bit of prolixity in the opening movement and what may have been a misfire in the instrumental color — or at least in matching color and musical substance. Now, there are darned few quality chamber works for double bass, and we wouldn’t begrudge any fine player (and Dae Hee Choo, who played it here, is definitely one of those) resorting to any of them. Composers have normally (if you can use that word in such a small universe of examples) gone for the upper range of the instrument to bring it within the scale of chamber music, unless, as with Rossini, comic effect was intended. Dvorák, however, writes extensively for the lower registers, possibly to free up the cello for more lyric duty, but by so doing considerably darkens the overall ensemble sound. The trouble is that the actual music, although quite dramatic at times, is not really that sort of music, leaving an oddly disconcerting impression. The situation was not helped by the acoustic of the YB hall, which, as adumbrated by the previously mentioned lower-range resonance of its piano, seems to amplify those low-frequency sounds. The result in the Dvorák was an often muddy texture.

Having said that, after a bit of early-on intonation wobbles and one or two lapses of ensemble, we were very pleased, as was the rest of the capacity crowd, with the quintet’s performance. The second-movement scherzo, of all the four movements, showed Dvorák in Czech folkloric mode, in high spirits and full of charm. The slow movement gave first violinist Violaine Melançon a rare opportunity in this work to show off a brilliant and singing upper range, and the rousing finale was spot on on all counts. The other fully praiseworthy members of the ensemble were Wan Zhen Li, second violin, Nathan Schram, viola, and Michael Katz, cello, all of whose body language evidenced a good time being had on stage as well as in the audience.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

They opened with what is in effect John Adams’s only violin sonata to date, a three-movement work called Road Movies. On his website Adams admits that the title is entirely whimsical and, if it has any relationship to the music, it is in the kind of steady driving rhythms largely given to the piano, into which he has composed an element of swing (see more on this below). Adams has written very little chamber music; his explanation is that it took him a long time to get his mind wrapped around the melodically-infused “democratic” spirit of the genre, whereas his principal concerns have always been with massed sonorities. You can get his whole program note for the piece here, as NMF, in its massive season program book, could find no room for program notes for anything. Road Movies has also been recorded, but only once, by Leila Josefowicz and John Novacek.

A key element in the outer movements is the application of swing. In fact, the last movement is entitled “40% swing,” in jocular reference to the fine gradations electronic instruments can apply to even as quintessentially personal and emotional a matter as rubato. The work as a whole bristles with Adams’s characteristic energy. The first movement begins with a running-note piano line, to which the movement’s title, “relaxed groove” ostensibly applies, but in which we detected little relaxation. Against this Adams sets up a violin line that is motivic rather than melodic in the conventional sense, based on a rising second. Sohn played it brusque and rough, maximizing the contrast very effectively. Adams has never been a true minimalist, and his repeated patterns here are laced with development and complexity. We would have liked to hear more power and projection from both players; Sohn was clearly giving it all the muscle she had, but it came across as a bit thin, while Blaha was hampered, we suspect, by the rather blocky and dull-sounding Yamaha NMF provided. (Really, in this setting, couldn’t someone have found an 1890s Steinway or Mason & Hamlin?) Sohn ended the movement, though, with a dramatically soft and thrillingly silken harmonic, which we wonder if the folks at the back of the room could even hear.

The slow movement, “meditative” (the published score apparently actually says “contemplative”) begins with a piano lick that recalls the blues movement of Barber’s Excursions, which the scordatura violin then picks up, spinning it into phrases always ending on a sustained note. Both performers here were into it, with Sohn supplying ample bluesy portamento. The finale, we confess, did not strike us as particularly swung. There were plenty of accent shifts, and a charming moto perpetuo feel to the fast bits, and yet another evocation (we really didn’t have this in mind when we came in) of Excursions, this time of the concluding barn dance. It ends with Adams’s typical abruptness, although this time we think he pulled his punch a bit. The music is evidently fearsomely difficult, and in all technical respects Sohn and Blaha were spot on all the way.

Closing the first half was that most mercurial of Beethoven’s violin sonatas, No. 9 in A major, op. 47, the Kreutzer, which Beethoven originally wrote for an English violinist who played it badly (not his fault — he had to sight-read the premiere!) and ultimately dedicated to an Austrian violinist who hated it and never played it at all. It is a wild ride, indeed, though how much of its modern popularity owes to Tolstoy’s name-stealing novella we can’t tell. (If the lovers had been performing the Spring Sonata, would the Kreutzer be played more often than any of the others?) Beethoven somewhat dismissively called it a “mulatto” sonata, and a sonata in the style of a concerto. Most of you know it well enough that we can truncate our description, but you can of course download the score and even listen to a recording here if you don’t own one already. As to the Sohn-Blaha performance, the players provided a basically straightforward reading that only took off with more than standard nuance in the finale. Again, they were both clearly working hard, and there were certainly no technical defects, but it didn’t seem as though they were fully prepared to revel in Beethoven’s craziness. We wish we could be more helpful in specifying just what was missing — apart from the thinness of Sohn’s sound and the clunkiness and lack of brilliance in the piano itself, coupled with a certain sameness in Blaha’s dynamics. Bottom line, they did not set the night on fire.

photo by Nathaniel Koven

The Kreutzer can certainly stand to be the closer in any violin recital, but this time around the players devoted the second part of the program to César Franck’s popular and only Violin Sonata in A major, M.8. Their approach to the first movement, marked “Allegretto ben moderato” (how noncommittal can you get?) was to focus on its dreaminess, which is a perfectly good thing to do; at times the dreamy seemed a bit more like wan (we’re not talking primarily about dynamics here, but about fullness and roundness of tone), especially in the anacruses to the principal tune. The second movement has an extravagantly difficult piano part, which Blaha negotiated deftly but without enough stress on the melody notes — again, not necessarily her fault. Sohn also did very well here with Franck’s tortuous chromaticism, which produces probably the most zigzag path ever invented to a phrase that ends conventionally in diatonic D minor. The third movement, which Franck called a “recitative: fantasia,” demands, as it suggests, a maximum of freedom to realize its cadenza-like reverie. Sohn brought to it a grand intensity and both players seemed in this movement to have gotten fully inside the music, and vice versa.

The finale is a bit of a cheat on the composer’s part. With all the chromatic squirming of the inner movements, and a good part of the first (is this what Leonard Bernstein meant when he decried “tonal mush”?), for the finale he devised a simple diatonic tune (and a great one it is), which he treats mostly diatonically in a sonata-rondo, indeed the only memorable tune. Although it is a charming and relatively simple construct, it is not a lark. It seemed a bit too much like one in this performance, except for the reminiscences of the slow movement. Maybe Sohn and Blaha downplayed the main theme to enhance the contrast with these other passages, but if so the gambit miscued. Overall, this was a very good, but not a great, performance, an observation we could extend to the whole program. In other words, it was what we suspect the NMF audience came to hear, as evidenced by its enthusiastic response, quite enough to engender an encore, which was Jascha Heifetz’s arrangement of Manuel Ponce’s charming 1912 song Estrellita, charmingly rendered.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

The quartet, founded in 1985 as the Leningrad String Quartet (changing names when their home town did after the Soviet collapse), flit from its homeland and has for many years been resident at Oberlin Conservatory, with annual returns home, whence they do most of their recording. They and the Borodin Quartet are now considered the leading Russian quartets (or, in the StPSQ’s case, quartets of Russians), and they continue to focus on works from Russia and its former empire. That was definitely the case for their Rockport programs: on July 8 they opened (and closed, if you count the encore) with work by Georgian composer Sulkhan Tsintsadze (1925-91), who is not exactly a household name in the US but who was probably the leading Georgian composer of the twentieth century. They followed with two less familiar works by familiar Russian masters, the Quartet No. 7 in F sharp minor, op. 108 of Shostakovich, and the Prokofiev Quartet No. 2 in F major, op. 92, and concluded with a rarity that has had a bit of prior exposure in this Boston concert season, Anton Arensky’s Quartet No. 2 in A minor, op. 35a (sort of — see below).

Tsintsadze was represented on the program by a late work, his 1990 Five Miniatures on Jewish Folk Songs. Throughout his career, this composer evinced a fascination for folk materials, largely from his own region, but sometimes spreading out, as this work did. At the same time, his frequent use of the  “miniature” format (he composed much large-scale work as well) allowed him to home in on the themes’ essential characteristics without the need to integrate them into a larger developmental framework (as the Prokofiev and Arensky quartets, described below, did). The five brief pieces comprising the Tsintsadze were a “Feast Song,” of a surprisingly somber cast, exposed contrapuntally and showing off some nice string writing, especially in the accompaniment, such as pizzicato glissandi: “L’Chaim,” a rather brisk and rough-hewn toast owing nothing to Fiddler on the Roof; “Lomir Ayle Inem,” ostensibly a drinking song but rather coming off like something Viennese; a tailor’s song in which Tsintsadze makes use of marvelous mixed textures; and “Lomir ich iberbreiten,” a kind of kiss-and-make-up song. For the most part the composer’s harmonic language would not have raised eyebrows in 1890; his texture was homophonic, and his technique was geared to exploring conventional string sonorities, chiefly in accompaniment figures, in a polished and adroit fashion. Except for first violinist Alla Aronovskaya and occasionally Vayner, the performances seemed oddly constrained and laid-back, an observation that we will extend to most of the music on the program.

The Shostakovich Seventh Quartet is not one of his most frequently performed — the one right afterwards is very possibly his most popular. The seventh is nevertheless a compact bit of brilliance that is well worth repeated hearing. Written in 1960 at the end of a decade that, after the blessing of Stalin’s death brought the bereavement to Shostakovich of his wife’s and mother’s deaths (the work is dedicated to his wife Nina’s memory) and the beginning of his health’s decline, the affect of this quartet is sometimes hard to parse. It is not unrelentingly gloomy like his very last works, but its occasional jauntiness is always undercut, principally by a three-repeated-note motif. There is much mysterious and atmospheric here as well, notably in the second movement’s somewhat unusual (for Shostakovich) pizzicato glissandi and quiet pulsation. The StPSQ produced a golden yet highly controlled sound with vibrato ranging from narrow to absent; in this case, the reticence was fully in keeping with the tone of the work. The third movement (all three are played without pause) is a musical and emotional twofer, beginning in a contrapuntal rushing scalar passage that abruptly changes tempo halfway on, to an allegretto that uses the same materials but in a more dance-like pattern that at first yields to, but eventually subdues, the sinister three-note motif. This is music to which the StPSQ is committed, and they performed it with the quiet intensity it deserves and requires.

In contrast to his younger colleague, who became a serial quartet writer, Sergei Prokofiev only wrote two of them. Written during World War II from the internal protective exile into which the Soviets placed their top creative artists, the Second Quartet is a very strange beast indeed. It is largely based on folk tunes of the Kabardin, a Circassian people centered in Kabardino-Balkaria in the far southwest of Russia, bordering Georgia. From the bright opening of the first movement to the concluding flourish of the third, it is hard to detect any of what was transpiring in the rest of the world in this piece. Sonically, too, this quartet is Prokofiev at his most demotic, although it is put together with all of his customary skill and has numerous points of interest: the haunting end of the slow movement, the gruff opening and crisp pizzicati of the finale. Still, in its seldom-broken homophony one senses the composer working at cross-purposes to the traditional “dialogue of equals” that string quartet writing employs. The performance by the StPSQ was fully idiomatic and energetic where it had to be, with sumptuous tone, but, as in most everything at this performance, suffering a bit from the reticence of cellist Leonid Shukayev.

The music to which the players seemed to have put their bowing arms to most vigorous use was the Arensky Second Quartet. This piece has a most curious history: written in 1894-5 and dedicated to the memory of his teacher Tchaikovsky, this quartet began as a work for one violin, viola and two cellos, not the most practical arrangement for a standard string quartet performance — one would need to put it on a concert that already had another cellist, perhaps for the Schubert or one of many other “cello quintets.” [Ed.: see the review of the BSO’s Tanglewood Prelude Concert on July 8, with that Schubert, here.] Arensky’s publisher, however, prevailed on the composer to arrange it for standard quartet and, sensing a potential hit in the central movement’s variations on a Tchaikovsky theme, he also arranged that movement for string orchestra, in which guise the NEC Chamber Orchestra performed it this past February, covered by us here. As it happened, the StPSQ was unaware of Arensky’s own arrangement, and so Vayner made his own, which they perform instead. Anyone who attended this performance might find some instructive amusement in comparing Vayner’s take to Arensky’s, which is available online at the IMSLP portal (the two-violin version is catalogued as op. 35a). One thing we noticed is that Arensky gave the opening tune to the second violin, and Vayner to the viola. Is anyone surprised?

Like every other work on the program but the Shostakovich, Arensky’s quartet derives from third-party material, in this case, in the outer movements, Russian church music of a memorial nature. Vayner did a good job in his arrangement of preserving the dark tone that would be the natural consequence of Arensky’s original scoring, and one could hear the distinct sound of the prototypical Russian male chorus running throughout. The themes are very well and effectively developed (though the finale depended too heavily on purely rhythmic variation of the theme), without constituting a major revelation; the work certainly deserves revival in either of its scorings. The Tchaikovsky variations benefited from the lighter four-voice texture, thereby bringing out many details of articulation that we missed in the string orchestra version, including the gentle parody of Tchaikovsky’s short salon pieces in the first variation, and the two final variations’ muted coloring (the last of which cleverly brought back the repeating-note figure that figures prominently in the opening movement and is further recalled in the finale).

The Arensky, as adumbrated above, brought out a full measure of warmth and projection from all the members of the StPSQ who, besides the three already mentioned, included second violinist Evgeny Zvonnikov, who just joined the quartet last year but whose skill, tone and polish certainly match those of his colleagues.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

The concert began with a fluent and spirited reading of Mozart’s final string quartet, no. 23 in F major, K. 590, one of the three he completed of a projected set of six commissioned by King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, a gifted amateur cellist–thus the occasional sobriquet “cello” quartets, on account of the greater than usual prominence of the King’s instrument. The DQ, on this occasion comprising regular first violinist Min-Young Kim, violist Jessica Thompson, and cellist Raman Ramakrishnan, and guest second violinist Aaron Boyd (substituting for Ara Gregorian), cut a perfect middle ground between emphasizing the erudition of Mozart’s conception and the palpable fun and tomfoolery of his execution. The first movement combined delicacy and jocularity, the latter chiefly abetted by Ramakrishnan’s mugging, body English, and crisp and pointed phrasing. The ensemble obviously enjoyed tossing the melodic footballs back and forth, and Boyd, who is concertmaster of the Arizona Symphony and who only sat in with DQ on a couple of weeks’ notice — and only rehearsed with them since the prior Tuesday — sounded as if he had been playing with them forever, so attuned was he to their repartee. They gave a proto-Schubertian turn to the dappled songfulness of the slow movement and reveled in the sophisticated rustications of the minuet. They then gave free rein to the start-and-stop, loud-and-soft goofiness and even barnyard coarseness (this, for a king?) of the finale, with which Mozart covered myriad contrapuntal complexities.

The first half closed with a performance of Richard Wernick’s 2010 String Quartet No. 8, which the DQ commissioned after having worked with Wernick on earlier performances. There’s a long and convoluted story behind the personal and professional connections between the composer, the DQ as an ensemble, and two of its members, but suffice it to say that in the end this quartet was commissioned on behalf of DQ by the communities of Bay Shore and Islip on New York’s Long Island and was dedicated in memory of Bay Shore’s high school music director, Howard Koch, with whom all concerned had worked at various times.

Although Wernick, a distinguished 77-year-old Pulitzer winner (1977) who has garnered many other prizes and awards — and who may be the most famous composer you’ve never heard of —had begun writing his eighth quartet before the Bay Shore grant came through, its memorial quality is reflected in its two slow movements, positioned second and fourth (of four). If we can generalize from a single work, Wernick’s voice is that of an orthodox modernist who, somewhat like Andrew Imbrie, espouses a lyrical atonality that respects the formal coherence of the European musical tradition.

The brief opening movement is toccata-like, featuring sustained notes and phrases over gnarly but fully intelligible rapid passages. The second movement, styled a chaconne, states its fundamental tune in the cello, where it reappears periodically under the variations, though there were times when it was either omitted or engulfed; nor were the variations exactly pellucid. This is plainly music that withholds much from the first hearing, despite its familiar structure. There are nevertheless some wonderful moments, often those where instruments complete each other’s sentences, as it were (throughout this piece Wernick demonstrates his mastery of quartet writing as colloquy in the grand old manner). There follows what Wernick cheekily calls a minuet, a very short movement that began life as a piano variation on Diabelli’s waltz that spawned Beethoven’s massive variation set. Needless to say, there was virtually nothing left of Diabelli in Wernick’s variation, and nothing whatever of Beethoven, as the composer fought against the 3/4 meter in this ephemeral and amusing romp. The finale picked up melodic strands from the second movement, this time in a more obviously developmental way, creating an atmospheric piece somewhat in the spirit of Bartók’s “night music” movements. There are particularly effective and affecting moments of near silence, with crystalline harmonics, and eerie twitterings (of the analog sort).

We pause to remark not only on the obvious dedication and skill of DQ brought to this work, but their sumptuous tone and shapely phrasing. While it’s a bit unfair to single out members of ensembles as organic as string quartets, we were notably impressed with violist Thompson’s rich sonority and fine portamento.

After intermission the quartet got to rest a bit while guest pianist Andrew Rangell took a solo turn with Leos Janácek’s In the Mists, an evocative four-movement suite that gave Rangell ample scope for his highly individual interpretive approach. Rangell, who not only during but also after his recovery from debilitating wrist injuries has cut back on his live concert appearances, is a near-legendary artist of both prodigious technique and enormous inner resource. We know there are pianists famous for quirkiness —think Russell Sherman, Glenn Gould and Peter Serkin — but while one tends to think that every oddity in their performances is backed by stacks of footnotes, Rangell is a throwback to the days of the poet-musician, to Liszt, Gottschalk and Nyíregyházi. He carries on a dialogue with the piano or the composer, displaying more tics than anyone we can think of this side of Oscar Levant. His touch is like iron, and sometimes his dynamics, as in the first of the four Janácek pieces, ran a little on the loud side, but his pedaling was fairly restrained except as he brilliantly cut off a phrase but left one lingering note of a chord. These pieces, not exactly standard rep but not as unfamiliar as the program note suggests, sometimes sounded a bit more New Agey than misty, but they get under the skin. Rangell drew from them as much inner Janácek as we have heard in this work.

The concluding work, the Ernö  (or Ernst von) Dohnányi Piano Quintet in E-flat minor, op. 26 — which is is Dohnányi’s second for this ensemble, though not so identified in the program — saw Rangell in a much more constrained, duly collaborative mode.

In writing about the composer’s first quintet last year, we noted that the composer took a more orthodox Central European approach than his slightly younger colleagues Bartók and Kodály, and while that remained the case in the Second Quintet, he narrowed the gap considerably. Written in 1914, it might well have been influenced by Bartók’s quintet of ten years earlier. The harmonic idiom is richly chromatic, the Hungarian (or at least “gypsy” — modern scholarship seems to have eschewed any strong dichotomy between Magyar and Roma music) inflections much more prevalent within the Viennese ambience. The opening is deep and dark, with lots for everyone to dig into (and they did!). The second movement is a Viennese waltz written as if it had been a csárdás (traditional Hungarian folk dance), with alternating slow and faster pacing. The finale opens with a bit of somber counterpoint, then flowers out into another intense and meaty essay with strong Hungarian inflections, coming to rest, finally, on a gentle major mode cadence. The performances by Daedalus and Rangell were first-rate, powerful, nuanced, and persuasive.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

The Claremont, a New York-based ensemble comprising Boston-bred twins Emily (violin) and Julia (cello) Bruskin, together with Vancouverite pianist Donna Kwong, have been steadily climbing in the esteem of chamber music lovers and are now reckoned among the country’s top piano trios, vying for the coveted slot of “the next Beaux Arts.” Piano trio literature is rich and varied, and the Claremont, no strangers to the Rockport Chamber Music Festival but making their first appearance at its new purpose-built home, made no concessions to the commonplace.

The program opened with the genial and congenial Trio on Popular Irish Melodies, a 1925 work by Swiss composer Frank Martin (1890-1974), whose music is unfortunately more heard of than heard. The story of its creation was well recounted in Sandra Hyslop’s program note: Martin was commissioned by an Irish-American patron to write a trio on Irish tunes. Martin dug deep into Celtic antiquity, and so instead of the medley on “Danny Boy” and such like the patron expected, Martin produced a fully composed, slightly recondite but fully accessible and entertaining bit of true chamber music. The patron, alas, was not amused, and refused to pay. In the event, the trio is full of archaisms, parallel open fifths and modal harmony, with characteristically Martinesque rhythmic vitality. Often the piano, and sometimes the cello, played the drums or the drone. Without ever losing the flavor of the tunes he quotes, Martin created complex rhythmic and melodic counterpoint that allows each performer to contribute memorable moments. The slow movement begins with a long cello solo, to which Julia B. (for obvious reasons we will contravene our usual editorial conventions for identifying performers) dedicated a duPré-like intensity. The concluding complex jig was a tour de force for the entire ensemble. While all the players were very visibly and vigorously attacking Martin’s surprisingly taut creation, our impression of the overall sound was of an oddly contained expressivity. Hold that thought.

The first half of the program concluded with another winsome rarity, the Piano Trio in D minor, op. 11 of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel. Unlike her brother’s famous trio in the same key, written in 1839 when he was 30, Fanny’s was the product of her last year, first performed by her (and maybe her brothers) in 1847, when she was 42, at a family musicale. In demeanor it is an interesting hybrid of Mendelssohnian fluidity and Schumannesque ardor. Melodically its opening theme strongly suggests, in its dotted-rhythm rising fifth, Felix’s tune from the Reformation symphony, but Fanny was certainly not subsuming her own personality, and despite the occasional — shall we say family — resemblances, she takes the music in her own directions. Among the unique characteristic’s of this work’s sound is its exploitation of the lowest notes of the cello. Formally as well, this trio has some unique personal touches: the score omits any exposition repeat in the first movement, anticipating later practice. Moreover, Fanny eschewed a traditional scherzo for this work, opting instead for a gentle “song without words” that anticipates Brahms’s use of a moderate intermezzo in the scherzo slot.

All this said, it remains evident that this trio is good music — even very good music — but not a great masterpiece. Despite its many felicities, some of the musical ideas and their workings-out are fairly pedestrian. That certainly doesn’t mean it should be ignored; to the contrary, it is certainly worthy of a place in the repertoire. What it does require, though, is salesmanship on the part of the performers to highlight its best points. The Claremont are certainly well positioned and well disposed to do this, and their performance had much to commend it. We point, however, to the slow movement as a missed opportunity to conjure the big picture. Whereas the opening movement, which occupies nearly half the work’s length, is bold and assertive, almost (but of course this is never truly the case) “playing itself,” the slow movement has gentle outer parts sandwiching a central section of increasing intensity. Emily B. strove mightily, to great effect, to point up this bit, but by focusing so much on the delicacy of the outer sections the contrasts seemed more arbitrary than organic. There should have been more seething under the lace to carry the larger form. The song, over in a flash, made no great impression. The finale, which was not fully up to the first movement musically, had many neat details, beginning with Kwong’s florid and Chopinesque opening cadenza (another point of difference between Fanny and Felix? He cordially detested Chopin’s writing …) and continuing with the grand struggle for supremacy between minor and major modes (very well presented by the Claremont), as well as an odd and fascinating, if somewhat incongruous, bit of Brahmsian gypsification tossed in.

At the close of intermission (an excessively long one considering the length of the program) the woven wood screen was closed across the grand window, much to the dismay of many who had been savoring the sunny day over Rockport Harbor. This, it turned out, was not for the usual reason —this concert, having started at 5 pm, was not going to engage an eye-piercing sunset —but as the first element in the Claremont’s reverse son-et-lumière production to accompany its performance of Olivier Messiaen’s great Quartet for the End of Time. As the trio and guest clarinetist Mark Nuccio entered — changed, in the case of the Claremont, from summery light to raven black — the house lights dimmed to nothing (patrons wishing to consult their programs and reviewers needing to take notes were out of luck this time), and stage lights faded to a minimum. The stage lights then ranged from dim to nil during the eight movements that constitute what many still regard as Messiaen’s magnum opus.

We all know the story behind Q40EoT: mostly written at a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II and first performed there by Messiaen and fellow prisoners; informed by the composer’s twin passions of ardent Catholicism and ornithophilia; the theologically-inspired Bunyanesque pictorialism. The eschatology of Messiaen’s apocalypse is nevertheless mostly a subdued one; except for two movements invoking the towering figure of “the angel who announces the end of time” to the accompaniment of appropriately crashing chords and generally gnarly sonorities in all the instruments and a depiction of the heavens rent by flaming lights, Messiaen’s wartime visions were mostly of the glorious transfiguration that follows the end of the material world (that is, the world of time). Birds, as always with Messiaen, are among the chief harbingers and actors in this process.

The clarinet often takes their part, most notably in the unaccompanied third movement (the only one written before Messiaen and his musician friends were taken prisoner), and otherwise in a leading role. Nuccio, currently acting principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic, was stunning in his entrances from and exits to silence, with a full range of tone and color between. The Claremont was here equally impressive, from Emily B.’s twittering in the first movement to Julia B.’s eerie glissandi and the gentle and ethereal meandering of Kwong’s piano against muted strings in the second. The quiet intensity of the soft passages dominated our impressions, while the long lyrical unaccompanied passages for cello and violin could not have been more perfect offsets to the furious unisons of the sixth and the fiery “rainbows” of the seventh movements, before the concluding, somewhat wistful, meditation on the immortality of Jesus that ends the work (in total darkness). All in all, a riveting performance. We’re only sorry that the players didn’t trust their audience to get it without the somewhat heavy-handed didactics of the light show.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

The program picked up a bit of the celebratory mood around campus, focusing largely, though not exclusively, on music for woodwinds and, again not exclusively, on the lighter, festive end of the affective spectrum. It began with two short works for woodwind quintet, the Piccola Offerta Musicale by Nino (Giovanni) Rota, and the Scherzo, op. 48 of Eugène Bozza. Rota (1911-79), of course, is famous for his film scores for Fellini, Coppola, De Sica, and many others, but like many another film composer, from Korngold to Herrmann to Williams, produced a notable œuvre of concert music. The “little musical offering”—a titular if not much of a musical nod to J. S. Bach—is a product of 1943, a time of great disruption for many but not, apparently, for him. It is a straightforward piece with lyrical outer sections in moderate tempo and a faster and more contrapuntally active middle one. The lyrical bits featured a warm and blended sonority (not easy with a wind quintet), while the faster section brought out the individual characters of the instruments. No revelations in the music, no wartime agony, just pure pleasure. The Radius quintet, comprising Joanna Goldstein, flute, Montbach, Eran Egozy, clarinet, Gregory Newton, bassoon, and Anne Howarth, French horn, was suave and assured.

We were especially looking forward to hearing the Scherzo by Eugène Bozza (1905-91), having written a piece in this genre for this ensemble. We confess lack of prior familiarity with the composer, so let us tell you what we have since found out: he was one of the back-benchers of the twentieth century whose work is more respected than heard, except among woodwind players, for whom he wrote scads of effective, idiomatic, playable, listenable, trouble-free repertoire. A Parisian originally from Nice, Bozza made his peace with the Vichy regime and settled in as conductor of the Opéra-Comique, which is where he was in 1944 when he wrote the Scherzo. A stylistic magpie, Bozza drew on most of the less threatening currents rippling through Paris in the early 1900s, and one detects in his little scherzo riffs of Ravel, Poulenc, Milhaud and even d’Indy and Saint-Saëns. You have probably spent more time reading these sentences than it took Radius to perform the Scherzo. It scurries with passages in slidey decoratively chromatic (but firmly tonal) harmony, almost like a moto perpetuo. We said that Bozza wrote idiomatically for every instrument, but that doesn’t mean he made things easy. To their immense credit, none of the Radius players gave the slightest appearance of breaking a sweat, though there were places where some were left gasping for breath.

The outlier on the program, sonically, stylistically and in ambition, was the first-half closer, Beethoven’s Archduke Trio, No. 7 in B flat, op. 97. A program of mostly lighthearted work for winds needs a bit of gravitas, and here it was. For purposes of programming, the Archduke was a nearly perfect choice—in major mode, with some of Beethoven’s most gratifying tunes, a scherzo of witty gruffness and even a touch of satire (of the waltz craze then only beginning to sweep Vienna), yet with all the richness and complexity of development and structure one expects from a late-middle-period Beethoven work. That there were no wind parts in it also helped set it apart from the rest of the program.

Of course, the fact that the Archduke—nicknamed for its dedication to Beethoven’s patron, student and friend Archduke Rudolph of Austria—is a pillar of the chamber music repertoire, puts special demands on those who perform it. Established ensembles play this stuff over decades, and create serious barriers to entry, as the economists say. Every new performance should seek to contribute something to our understanding by way of interpretation or execution. The trio of Radius performers who tackled it, violinist Jae Young Cosmos Lee, cellist Miriam Bolkosky, and pianist Sarah Bob, gave a professionally competent and workmanlike reading consistent — one is driven to add “strange to say,” considering the performers’ background in new music — with the older central European Romantic tradition. That’s neither here nor there, but there were problems of balance and execution that kept the performance from gelling: Bolkosky’s cello is ravishingly resonant in tone and she pulled out all the stops. The problem, however, was that Lee produces a rather small and refined sound that couldn’t pack enough wallop to match. Bob sensibly chose to keep Killian’s boomy and somewhat thick-voiced piano at short stick, but the balance problems of the ensemble, exacerbated by a lack of brilliance in the piano’s upper range and Bob’s occasional difficulties articulating Beethoven’s passagework, were ameliorated only in the scherzo’s trio and in the slow movement, where the piano does most of the heavy lifting and Bob was particularly engaged and effective.

The program got back on its primary track after intermission with two relatively recent (if you think less than fifty years old constitutes recent) compositions, beginning with Jan Bach’s 1964 Four Two-Bit Contraptions for flute and horn. The overall name, an obviously jokey reference to the two-part inventions of That Other Bach, to whom Jan is unrelated except, in works like this, perhaps by way of PDQ, covers four short character pieces apparently, per Katherine Bacasmot’s program note, intended to portray Bach’s then-roommates, who played those instruments. “Second Lieutenant” offers military flourishes capped with a jazzy riff. “Calliope” is a fractured circus waltz that reminded us of Ives’s Mr. Riley, as well as Peter Schickele’s comment that PDQ Bach’s dance music proved one of his legs was shorter than the other. “Gramophone” offered a jazzy 1920s tune in the flute, to off-kilter harmonies and appropriate 1920s percussive effects engendered by tapping a bit of wood on the end of the horn’s mute; the period effect was crowned by a simulation of a scratched record. “Pinwheel” was another moto perpetuo that challenged the players’ breath control. They (Howarth and Goldstein) were up to it, but we wish Goldstein’s tone were as brilliant as the music seemed to demand.

Michael Daugherty, now 57, is a composer who has made his name by integrating aspects of American popular music and culture into concert music — his most famous piece, probably, is his Metropolis symphony of 1988-93—the reference is to Superman, not Fritz Lang. Nothing in his professional CV would have led one to expect these developments: he did his time in the post-serialist groves of  Darmstadt and IRCAM and had all the proper academic credentials of a proper academic (he still teaches at the University of Michigan). From 1993 also are his two meditations on the rise, fall and afterlife of that supreme pop icon, Elvis Presley: Elvis Everywhere for string quartet and tape, and Dead Elvis for bassoon and mixed ensemble. Radius performed the latter, which is a kind of morality play on the sacrifice of authenticity for celebrity. Among the many factors within the piece contributing to the message are the instrumentation — violin, contrabass, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone and percussion — taken directly from Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat, itself a Faustian tale; from the juxtaposition of tunes from the Elvis canon with musical commentary based on the famous plainchant tune of the Dies Irae, so beloved of Romantics from Berlioz to Liszt to Rachmaninov; and from the personification of Elvis in the solo bassoon.

In this latter regard Radius went truly over the top, with soloist Newton (an unimaginable coincidence, that—is anyone else thinking of that other Elvis successor named Newton?) replete in wig and full sleazeball-Elvis jumpsuit and jewelry. This bit of irresistible theatricality did not, fortunately, detract from Newton’s performance, which was bravura all around. The same goes for the rest of the ensemble, comprising Lee, Egozy (who also did a turn as narrative “emcee,” including the final send-off after Newton had taken his bows and exited — we don’t have to tell you what he said, do we?), John Russell, trumpet, Gabriel Longfur, bass trombone, David Goodchild, contrabass, and Aaron Trant, percussion — who performed this work unconducted. Bravo! The piece itself struck us as excessively didactic, but it was effective and well built. You will be able to hear it for yourself whether or not you were at the concert: Radius will post a podcast of it on their web site here.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

The program might have seemed a bit random to some casual observers, but there was a canny intelligence at work. The evening opened with the newest piece, a 2003 movement by Andy Vores, written originally for NEP, and called at  that time G Major. It has since taken on a second life as the first movement of Vores’s Antimpony (anti-symphony, get it?), in which position it has been renamed Open. The work’s original title is, like a good deal of the musical content, a bit of a joke: while in several senses the work is about G major, it is not actually in it, and its final two chords are G major and D7, meaning that one is left hanging for a resolution. The music of the piece is mostly like that as well, full of passages sounding like they’re about to settle on something — a chord, a tune, a cadence, whatever — and never actually doing it. There are many gestures, ostinati that hold things together, cross-cuts, and an overall A-B-A structure. The final section has a whiff of Petrushka about it, but it is overall a witty, slick and entertaining amuse-bouche. Pittman and his band kept everything humming quite satisfactorily.

A much (much!) heavier course followed, in the form of the late Donald Erb’s Concerto for Brass and Orchestra, written in 1986 for the Chicago Symphony, whose legendary brass section was exploited knowingly by the composer, himself a classical and jazz trumpeter. Its exploration of brass sonorities, often in allied pairs as well as in solos (there are cadenzas for tuba, French horn, and trumpet) and in sectional blocs, is, however, anything but lighthearted. It starts slowly and builds in big dissonant chordal units with toccata-like joining passages. It reminded us a bit of the late Ralph Shapey, especially in the thickness of the scoring, which alas often undermined the coloristic effects, some of which were quite lovely, and not all of them for brass. The central movement comes to focus on a funereal Lutheran chorale tune, Alle Menschen müssen sterben, surrounded by a lovely halo of string runs, and eventually overwhelmed by strongly articulated percussion and winds. By and by, the Lutherans get tipsy and slide under the table. (Had they accidentally stumbled into an Irish wake?) The trumpet cadenza in the third and final movement is the most elaborate of the three, and the run-up to the end displays a sudden clarity of texture and harmony, and a punchiness of rhythm, theretofore largely lacking.

The performance, considering the NEP’s mix of professional, amateur, and student performers, was pretty good, but the NEP is no match for the CSO, and certainly not its signature brass section. The three cadenza-bearing players, tuba Tim Sliski, horn Jeff Stewart and especially trumpet Jason Huffman, acquitted themselves with distinction.

The late Earl Kim spent the latter part of his teaching career at Harvard and was a greatly respected member of the Boston musical community. His compositional personality, as typified by the 1979 Violin Concerto, was very nearly the polar opposite to Erb’s. This was elegant, refined, restrained, gentle music, sort of a Delius to Erb’s Berlioz. Kim’s idiosyncratic serialism focuses more on the hexachord (the six-note module containing half the chromatic spectrum) than the full twelve pitches to the octave — a half-Babbitt, one might say. The violin’s opening melody, which underpins the entire piece, is made up of only three pitches. The sonorities are mostly spare and pointillistic after a fashion, with occasional full-orchestra punctuation. When we say that Kim’s serialism is idiosyncratic, we mean among other things that he is not afraid to include purely diatonic scalar passages and some exquisitely sweet harmonies (we’re sure all these things fit into the serial structure, but that’s a screen we’d rather not lift). This is a wonderful, engaging work that should be better known.

Maddon, the NEP’s regular concertmaster (she was back in position for the second half of the program!) evinced warmth and brought a solid musicality to her interpretation of the solo part. Hers is not a supremely polished or powerful sound, and we thought her staccatos in the first-movement cadenza were a bit too mechanistic, but she held her own and was a persuasive leader of and collaborator with the orchestra. Under Pittman’s direction, the NEP was highly empathetic and thoroughly in sync with Kim’s esthetic.

We wondered where all the Mahler fans were on Saturday: the Tenth Symphony, of which he completed only one movement and sketched and scored the other four in varying degrees of fullness, is rarely performed, and is as deep and dark a piece as one could ever want from the hand of this master. Needless to say, with his penchant for later modern music, Pittman made much, in the program notes and his viva voce introduction, of the “modernity” of Mahler’s harmonies in the Tenth‘s opening Adagio, and the high esteem in which Mahler held Arnold Schoenberg. One can carry this a bit too far, though; Mahler had definite views on the limits of chromaticism and famously rejected the drift of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1. The “big moment” in the Mahler, of course, is the stark and unresolved dissonance at the heart of the movement, but that moment’s musical and emotional context fully integrates it with the tonal fabric of the piece, just as Beethoven similarly did in the Eroica. What impresses one in hearing what there is of the Tenth (not counting the more or less speculative performing versions and completions by Deryck Cooke, the Matthews Brothers and others) is the extraordinary spareness of the texture, notwithstanding the typically Mahlerian scale of the orchestra (the NEP’s ensemble was comparatively undersized).

Be all this as it may, Pittman and the NEP deserve credit for undertaking such a project, which cleverly book-ended Vores’s cheekily unresolved gestures with Mahler’s über-Romantic ones. It is fair to say that Pittman is not one of your great Mahler conductors, though he is by no means a bad one. His lines were well shaped, his tempi were well chosen, and the climaxes were convincing. Unlike the Kim’s, the Mahler’s spareness of scoring exposed many weaknesses of execution, especially in the strings (the winds an brass, however, came through with flying colors). It was a long, complicated program, and something had to give. It was, however, a wonderful opportunity to hear this too-seldom-programmed work, and to realize that every once in a while one can forgo the Liebestod and have something else every bit as moving that won’t take any longer to play.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

The Crucifixion is a curious hybrid. Setting texts written by William J. Sparrow-Simpson or selected by him from the Bible, Stainer styled the work “A Meditation on the Sacred Passion of the Holy Redeemer.” Unlike the passion settings by Bach, which combined dramatic narratives of Jesus’ final week with striking personal reflections from the standpoint of putative witnesses (or modern Christians imagining themselves in that position), Sparrow-Simpson’s texts are rather light on narrative and heavy on an abstract and theologically fraught style of speech that rather distances one from the action on the field, and is quite distinct from the blood-curdling immediacy of the Lutheran style, even from Mendelssohn’s suaver version of it. For his part, Stainer took pains to make this work a practical one, intended for non-professional choirs (it is more demanding on the two soloists, tenor and baritone, though operatic chops are not necessary), and also for congregational participation: where Bach interspersed chorales among his arias, choruses and recitatives, Stainer wrote hymns, intending that congregants join in. Jones invited the audience Sunday to do so, and printed the music and texts for them in the program. We don’t know if this participatory methodology was typical of Stainer’s time, but it is a concept that Britten, for example, carried forward to good effect in his Saint Nicolas.

The cantata is in 20 numbers, of which five, mostly in the latter half, are hymns. Some of these are truly lovely, like No. 13, “Jesus, the Crucified, pleads for me,” and the final one, “All for Jesus.” Others are sturdy simple tunes in the spirit of Lowell Mason (who was nearly as popular in England as he was in the US), inflected (we were going to say “tarted up,” but that would scarcely do for a sacred work not by Rossini) with Victorian decorative chromaticism — though there’s a humdinger of a chord progression in No. 15, “I adore thee”). We did wonder, though, about Stainer’s assumptions concerning congregational vocal competence, with some of these hymns requiring F’s and F-sharps atop the treble staff, not really recommended to be sung from the pews. There were also times we thought Stainer rather demanding of a congregation’s patience, as in the musically unvarying ten verses of No. 5.

The rest of the music too has its gratifying moments, as well as a few moments of soporific and even wince-inducing banality. The two strongly narrative and emotive sections, Nos. 3, “Processional to Calvary” and 18, “The Appeal of the Crucified,” showed that Stainer could rise to a solid occasion. The former, influenced by Mendelssohn, was the only one involving noticeable counterpoint, albeit of a rudimentary sort, but it was dramatically effective, with some flashes of harmonic inspiration. The latter, imagining Jesus’ sometimes bitter reaction to the throngs passing beneath him (the best of Sparrow-Simpson’s work on this piece), is the musico-dramatic highlight of the cantata, with an effective chromatic setting of the refrain “Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?” Stainer’s skill here, pointed to the max by Jones and his forces, shows how ill-served he was by the foggy High Church piety that smothered so much of the text.

It almost goes without saying, so we will say it, that the HUC and Jones’s leadership were impeccable. So too was the finely varied playing of Christian Lane on the restored Skinner organ of Appleton Chapel. Stainer was careful to specify most of the registrations right in the score, if you’re curious, (after scrolling to the correct title) you can download here, but Lane threw in a few nice touches of his own, including some “harpeggios” at the end of No. 18. Jones took a few liberties of his own with the score, chiefly in the nature of pregnant pauses, most of which seemed appropriate. The two soloists were James Onstad, tenor, and Jonathan Mark Roberts, baritone, both from the Harvard class of ’09 and well embarked on professional careers. Onstad was perfectly spot on in every regard, with a silken tone, excellent diction and phrasing. Roberts too was dramatically effective, always centered on pitch and thrillingly resonant in the (relatively rare) low notes; his projection and diction were a bit weaker. There were four soloists (all male: we’re ever put off by English composers’ apparent disdain for female voices) from among the choir: Ryan Duncan, Jerome Fung, William Hawley and Jack Huizenga, who kept well to pitch and rhythm, but were too often nasal sounding and seemingly off in another room.

This was a worthy effort to bring Stainer to a wider audience. But for Jones’s questionable decision to forbid applause out of a misplaced piety for the dedicatee (Gomes loved applause), we would have given it several hearty rounds.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

The program was a mildly daring one by BSO standards, restricted as it was to eighteenth-century works (and don’t think we didn’t hear complaints about that from some audience members). It was also a relatively high-stakes outing for Debus: although in his thirteen-year career he has conducted in some major opera houses, mostly in Europe — at least according to the biographies we were able to scrounge up online in addition to the one in the program book, the BSO is the biggest-name symphony orchestra he has yet tackled, and in one of his few non-operatic ventures (his Tanglewood gig was a concert performance of The Abduction from the Seraglio). With the BSO in its currently leaderless — and possibly rudderless — state, audience buzz, whether informed or not, ran in the channels of “is this a job interview?”

The Mozart K. 318 is listed as a symphony, but what it really seems to be, and may have been intended to be, is an opera overture. It is in a single movement broken into fast-slow-fast sections, where the latter is a modified recapitulation of the former, with the slow section a lyric interruption. Steven Ledbetter’s customarily enlightening program note pointed to André Grétry as precedent for this structure, but we have also heard some Haydn opera overtures in this configuration. Mozart apparently wrote it in 1771 but expanded the orchestration in 1785. Its principal theme bears some resemblance to a tune from The Marriage of Figaro, dating from 1786. While certainly not among Mozart’s deepest works, it is not without interest and is an exemplary curtain-raiser that is not often performed; Sir Colin’s programming judgment was astute.

Debus has a reputation as a balletically inclined leader, but while occasionally bouncing along with Mozart’s infectious rhythms he, and consequently the orchestra, seemed oddly restrained. The dynamics ranged from medium to loud; it occurred to us that one benefit of playing this kind of music with a largish ensemble on modern instruments is that one can access a wider dynamic range, a benefit of which Debus did not avail himself in this piece.

Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, one of his last compositions, remains the leading and most popular work in this genre, and along with Haydn’s trumpet concerto is surely the greatest Classical-era concerto for a wind instrument. Tradition at the BSO seems to be that the orchestra’s principal player gets to do it; the program book could identify only one occasion in which that was not the case — Benny Goodman was the soloist on that occasion — and Mr. Hudgins therefore took his stand (literally so: he played from the score) in that illustrious procession. In the first movement Debus conducted with admirable clarity and emphasis on contrapuntal activity, but we again sensed a reticence when it came to dynamics, although this was not a big issue for Hudgins, whose beautiful round tone was well mated to subtle dynamic refinement; his staccatos were crisp without harshness, and blended perfectly into legatos. In the slow movement, Hudgins appropriately emphasized the pathos in Mozart’s lyricism and was smooth as silk: not a hint of breath or any break in purity, regardless of register. This suavity may have been a bit misplaced in the finale which did not receive as rollicking a rendition as we might have liked. Overall, we didn’t get any interpretive revelations here, just a solid and straightforward presentation of impeccable technical prowess — a textbook example, you might say, with all the pluses and minuses that entails.

The tone of things changed remarkably after intermission. It was apparent that Debus had real affection for Haydn 97, which, of all the Salomon symphonies is among the less performed, for no good reason we can see. It’s a dilly in Haydn’s brightest, most festive, wittiest and paradoxically most learnèd manner. Debus was caught up in it all —brilliant colors, snappy tempi, all the dynamic contrasts that were missing from his Mozart. A few details we particularly appreciated were the marvelous transition from the slow introduction to the first movement allegro; the quacking wind interjections in the theme, and the dynamic contrasts in the minore variation in the slow movement, whose sul ponticello passages, superbly executed by the BSO strings, must have knocked their socks off in 1792, the liveliness and panache of the minuet (for Haydn an unusually through-composed one), and the delicious chromatic slides in the finale. This performance alone would have been worth the price of admission.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.