Like Nanki-poo’s catalogue, that of the TCMF this year is long, “through every passion ranging.” There are eight official TCMF concerts from August 12 through 16, but the underlying historical theme of the festival also has permeated the overall Tanglewood programming: concerts throughout July and up to August 8 have incorporated the illustrious TMC affiliates.

The Festival proper kicks off with a program in Ozawa Hall conducted by Knussen, featuring the BSO’s Principal Double Bass Edwin Barker, in Theodore Antoniou’s Concertino for Double Bass and String Orchestra along with works of George Perle, Gunther Schuller, Bruno Maderna and Paul Hindemith, all former TMC faculty. Subsequent programs in Ozawa Hall include works by Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, Lukas Foss, Hans Werner Henze, Andrew McPherson (a former Harbison student at MIT who double-majored in music and electrical engineering), Betsy Jolas, Steve Mackey, Bright Sheng, Yehudi Wyner, Irving Fine, Alexander Goehr, Luciano Berio, Helen Grime, Michael Gandolfi, Olivier Messiaen, Jacob Druckman, Colin Matthews, and Copland, whose epic Third Symphony was largely written at Tanglewood.

The BSO itself gets into the act with a program on August 13 under the baton of Miguel Harth-Bedoya featuring Osvaldo Golijov’s Mariel for cello and orchestra, with Alisa Weilerstein as soloist, along with other works from Latin American composers including Daniel Alomía Robles and Gabriela Lena Frank, whose Illapa features BSO Principal Flute Elizabeth Rowe.

The annual Fromm Concert on August 15 features an operatic double bill, Harbison’s Full Moon in March and Knussen’s collaboration with Maurice Sendak in Where the Wild Things Are. On the afternoon of August 15 (a busy day for those of you who want to hear it all! — there are morning, afternoon and evening programs) the BSO includes Schuller’s Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee and Bernstein’s Prelude, Fugue and Riffs, with Thomas Martin, clarinet soloist, in a program also featuring Gershwin’s An American in Paris and Piano Concerto in F (an amazing masterpiece whose subtlety has never been truly appreciated by the supposed cognoscenti) with Jean-Yves Thibaudet, all conducted by Robert Spano. Gershwin, alas, died before the founding of TMC, so we’ll never know if he would have been welcomed or snubbed.

Among the works on the TCMF program that most tickle our fancy and curiosity are George Perle’s 1979 Concertino for Piano, Winds and Tympani, on the opening program (soloists not announced) on August 12; the Golijov on August 13; Steve Mackey’s Gaggle and Flock and Yehudi Wyner’s Passage, both on August 14; the revival of Berio’s circles (so au courant in the ’60s) on the morning program on the 15th, the two operas on that evening’s program and the Matthews and Copland on the final one. Copland’s attempt to write the Great American Symphony, as self-conscious and freighted as it was, nevertheless was not the dud many have assessed it to be. Next to the Ives Fourth, it ranks up there with the best you can think of —the Harris Third, the Thomson First, the Chadwick Second, the Barber First — and for sheer cleverness it has a distinct touch: all the themes are based on the Fanfare for the Common Man that crowns the finale. Robert Spano, who will conduct the TMC orchestra in the Copland and the BSO in the Gershwin concerto (which also uses a motto theme to which all the others are related) is in a position to reclaim, in different ways, two great American classics.

For the 2009 season, after a few years of narrowly chosen programming, it seemed that the TCMF was getting back to its roots with an eclectic menu. This year, it’s ahead to the past with an inward focus on TMC’s history. Why this year, with the 75th anniversary just a few years away, we don’t know, and why the particular works were chosen no one will be able to tell until after hearing them. We hope there is a tie-in to the ongoing teaching work of TMC, and that the audience will be able to take away, after it’s all over, a sense of whether and how the TMC has affected or been affected by the musical and personal influences of its leaders.

Consult the listings here on BMInt, or at www.tanglewood.org for fuller details on each program in the festival.

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 Haydn quartet, his last completed work in the genre, dates from 1799 and was part of an ambitious commissioning project by Prince F. J. M. Lobkowitz, which also bagged him the six quartets of Beethoven’s op. 18. He wanted six from Haydn as well, but the composer, beset by minor distractions such as the late masses, The Creation and The Seasons, came up with only two. Some have suggested that the composer was carefully husbanding his waning energies for these big projects and coasting a bit on the Prince’s quartets. The F major, while not as obviously recherché as some of the op. 76 set of a year or two earlier, is everything one would wish in late Haydn — subtle, clever, learned and vastly entertaining, all at once. There are, especially in the development of the first movement, touches reminiscent of the London Symphony. Its second movement, unusually by this stage of Haydn’s development, is the minuet, which belies all the clichés about Haydn’s minuets by being, first, rather fast, and second, rhythmically spiced with off-accents. The slow movement is also a brisk Allegretto set of variations, and the finale, in the guise of folksy geniality, delivers a rhythmic propulsion that puts paid to the “sick old man” hypothesis.

The Brentano approached this autumnal work with a seemingly contradictory mix of regal composure and hands-on relish. Their phrase shaping was elegant, their rhythms executed with verve and — you may see this next word repeated a bit here — precision, notably in the octave and unison ending of the first movement. We’re not sure whether this is an individual quirk of this group or a regional feature — sort of a musical New York accent — but the players are given greatly to expressions of body English of one kind or another (all except the stoical Mr. Amory). Steinberg likes to twist about in his seat, Canin to a lesser extent. Lee, however, cultivates facial expressivity of a most voluble sort: smirking here, frowning there (of this, more later), smiling benignly at cleverness and felicities in the music. Cute, up to a point; audiences paying to see live performances should, we agree, get some good visuals. A good thing can, however, be carried too far, and this may be the only real negative thing to say about Thursday’s performance.

The Hartke Night Songs, the composer explained (quoted in the program note; he was not present at the performance), started out to be a regular old string quartet (it’s got the regular old four movements all in the “right” order), but his materials just called out to be treated more like madrigals, with self-contained mini-dramas. And so they were, although one could so describe all regular old string quartets and classical concert music generally. Be that as it may, this 2009 work is full of delights. The first movement, called “Madrigal,” gets off to a light, lyrical start, deepens in timbre and intensity, and eventually fades to black on muted strings. The slow movement, aptly named “Lament,” is intense, with several subgroup dialogues punctuated by anguished tutti outbursts. There are many lovely changes of color and sonority and some beautifully performed second violin solos in harmonics from Canin. The third movement, an intermezzo à la Brahms rather than a scherzo, echoes the coloration and affect of the first movement before ending in a pensive mood. The finale pits a pumping 5/4 rhythm in the cello against sul ponticello and col legno effects for the others, then everyone picks up the rhythmic idea; later iterations vary the leading role. This movement also reverberates with material from earlier movements, most impressively from the slow movement, before ending quietly on the rhythmic figure. The playing throughout was exceptionally tight and seemed to us to be right on the money.

Sylvia Hyslop’s program note on the Beethoven counsels, quoting Schumann, not to attempt to describe it in words, but simply to let oneself be overwhelmed by the ineffable majesty of Beethoven’s notes. Yes, well, … as it happens, a great many words have been written to plumb this most recondite of Beethoven’s (or, indeed, anyone’s) compositions, not least by Richard Wagner, who characterized the work as a whole with a paraphrase from Goethe’s Faust: a day that fulfills not a single desire; not one. You can see a translation of Wagner’s fanciful attempt to cast this quartet as a tone poem avant la lettre here at pages 104-5. Ms. Hyslop to the contrary notwithstanding, concertgoers who have not heard this work a lot recently may wish to have a proper description of this rather complicatedly structured work, which Wikipedia duly provides here.

More than most works in the classical repertory, indeed even more than most Beethoven works, this quartet carries a burden of masterpiece mythology: this is Very Serious Heavy Stuff that performers and audiences must approach with girded loins and high cerebral engagement. For our part, we had hoped that younger ensembles like the Brentano would try to dispel this attitude and simply let the notes speak for themselves. Our hopes were not fully realized, to some extent owing to factors already discussed: everybody was wearing his or her Very Serious, Heavy Stuff face, and they contorted their bodies around the notes as if to mimic the harmonic permutations of the score. Still, this was a first-rate performance, also for reasons previously mentioned: the watchwords here were smoothness and precision. Some performances we have heard of this work, by the great quartets of their day, have sounded a bit rough and unhinged, especially in the scherzo (fifth movement of seven) and finale. We found that the Brentano did not need to sacrifice anything of the propulsive power of these sections to achieve clarity and proportionality of sound. The only quibble we have about this approach is that it may have made for too careful and cautious a reading of the central slow movement, a fairly simple theme and its seven-and-a-half complex variations. We are of two minds about that, since clarity and precision are virtues with this movement, when they point the listener to the sometimes tenuous relation between the variations and the theme. We were similarly impressed with the stunning clarity of the trills and the rumbling thunder shakes in the third and sixth variations, respectively.

A further contribution to the discussions concerning the sonic properties of the Shalin Liu Concert Center came from a discussion we had with Tom Stephenson, the hall’s recording engineer, who from his perspective finds the hall a very warm and friendly place for recording. So far, he has only recorded live performances, with typically full houses. Just add that to the mix of information about whether the sound lacks reverb. For our part the hall only enhanced the clarity and (here it is again) precision of the quartet’s playing. For the record, the first half of the concert saw the rear window uncovered (treating the audience to a magnificent transition from dusk to night over Rockport harbor).

The program called forth a formidable array of musicians — 13 in all, including Monadnock co-Artistic Directors Laura Gilbert, who played flute in the Haydn, and Jonathan Bagg, who was violist for the Brahms. And this does not include Ms. Wagner, who was present and gave a brief introduction to her piece. The players are mostly drawn from the New York and Boston freelance pools, and are all of the high quality you would expect from America’s two top classical music cities.

The opening work, which we should properly call Haydn/Salomon, took a full symphony orchestra and boiled it down to a string quartet with flute obbligato. One might imagine that the flute would stand in for the whole wind section, but although this symphony was scored for a rather full complement of winds and brass — flute, oboes, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, with clarinets added for the slow movement, to say nothing of a percussion section of tympani augmented by triangle and bass drum — the wind parts mostly double strings, except for the one flute. Thus, among other fascinating anomalies, this arrangement gives the military flourishes at the end of the slow movement that earned the work its sobriquet to the stings alone. The work itself, being one of Haydn’s most popular, needs little discussion other than to note that it may apotheosize Haydn’s quirkiest gestures: dramatic pauses, sudden leaps to remote keys, and other surprises, which while they may have been influenced by similar passages in C.P.E. Bach, nevertheless surpass him in their ingenious integration into the architecture of the whole work. The performance here, by Ms. Gilbert, Jesse Mills and Adela Peña, violins, Mary Hammann, viola, and Rafael Popper-Keizer, cello, was delightful, graceful, forceful, and elegant as the situations required. One would not want to give up hearing this in its orchestral form, but we suspect Haydn was reasonably pleased with Salomon’s efforts, and so were we.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Melinda Wagner introduced her Pan Journal for harp and string quartet, a 2009 commission from the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, by linking it to the quiddities of Haydn’s symphony. She said that unlike most of her works, this one turned out less linear in reasoning and more capricious. She also described it as a light work, although she cautioned that she strove — as well she should — to go beyond the standard angelic sounds one is accustomed to hearing from the harp. One should apply a touch of circumspection in accepting statements like that from composers and other creative folk; they are often not the most acute analysts of their own work. In this case, the last observation was the most consistent with what we heard, although the writing for harp was far from extended technique, and would not, we suspect, have stirred the envy of a Carlos Salzedo, a true pioneer in writing for what was his own instrument. We confess to not being steeped in Ms. Wagner’s music, so her first remark may well be completely accurate; nevertheless, the single movement work struck us as having a fairly straightforward structure and rounded manner of working out. To be sure, It progresses in episodes and varies tempo, meter and texture, but the ideas are recognizably tossed about and return in what could, for aught it sounds, be something like sonata form. This, in case you were wondering, is not a negative comment. It was a perfectly solid, if not magisterial, work, by a top professional who knows how to keep the ears and brains of her listeners engaged. We would not call it a particularly light piece, either, although it’s hard to know any more what a composer means by the expression; hardly anybody these days, after all, tries to be as earnest as Schumann or Brahms or Schoenberg. We found no fault with the performance by Stacey Shames, harp, Joel Pitchon and Liza Zurlinden, violins, Tawnya Popoff, viola, and Greg Hesselink, cello, and Ms. Wagner appeared effusive in her gestures of approbation for them.

The Brahms Piano Quintet strikes us as a rather weighty meal, a good poser for a chill and drizzly November Sunday afternoon, rather than a sultry summer one. Still, one should not entirely forego the meat and potatoes for salad and vichyssoise when taking in the country air. The mild oddity of programming this work in this context was carried a bit further, however, than absolutely necessary in execution. Individually all the performers — Rieko Aizawa, piano, Mills and Peña, violins, Bagg, viola and Marie-Volcy Pelletier, cello — gave assured and committed performances (Ms. Pelletier sounded as if she were using her “B” instrument, though, which may be a prudent choice given the vagaries of non-climate-controlled venues, but which, as here, can demand unforeseeably hard work to avoid ugliness of tone). What failed here, almost utterly in the first movement, less so in the last two, was a unified ensemble.

Brahms Piano Quintet at Jaffrey Center Meetinghouse (Christopher Lawton photo)

Ms. Aizawa gave a forceful yet refined reading; Mills and Bagg, however, were taking no prisoners and for all purposes overwhelmed Peña (who was even largely hidden from view by Mills’s far-forward seating) and Pelletier (who, mercifully, had enough solo passages to let us know she was there). Aizawa, at least, had a formidable sound-making device at her disposal, though her elegance in the first two movements was undermined by the muscularity of the male performers. We think the performance would have greatly benefited from more attention to sonic balance and interpretive uniformity. The ensemble did, we must report, get things reasonably well together in the satanic scherzo — which in any case has a good deal of unison and octave writing — and the finale, whose sanguinary death-or-glory conclusion brought the audience to its feet.

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.

I am one of the reviewers for this publication, and I do not purport to speak for my colleagues here or, for that matter, anywhere. However, from this vantage point it has always made me squirm a bit when a performer or composer has thanked me for a good review. (So far, nobody has communicated to me on the subject of bad ones, so you may consider this essay a kind of pre-emptive strike). There’s something a bit… unprofessional, it seems to me, in giving or receiving thanks or brickbats for the expression of what is, after all, a mere opinion.

None of us who works on BMInt makes our living doing what we do here, but we are all part of the profession of music criticism and reporting. Our job is to tell the reader what we heard, explain the context a little, and, oh by the way, to say whether we liked it or not. In doing all of this we are not, unless someone comes up with clear and convincing evidence to the contrary, acting on the basis of personal advocacy or animus. The music world in Boston is pretty small, and most of us know quite a few of the literal and figurative players, but I think we all try to be disinterested when it comes to evaluating a work or a performance. I for one, and I have seen other reviewers here do likewise, tell you when a composer or performer is a close personal friend; I do not review performances at all by individuals or groups with whom I am closely related, for example by my wife or by organizations on whose boards I sit. OK, once I reviewed a college production for another publication when two of my children were performing, but in such small capacities that there was no need to mention them, and I didn’t.

What does it mean for someone to get a good or bad review? It is, after all, only the expression of one audience member’s opinion that may or may not reflect the opinions of the rest of the audience. Granted, we are all trained or experienced listeners to classical music here, and so if we express a reasoned opinion, one may take it as a reflection of informed judgment; and I will not try to deny that in some contexts, for example when there is only one review of a particular concert (not our fault, folks: we’re only here because there are too many concerts in the Boston market where there were *no* reviews at all), a review can be helpful or unhelpful to the subject’s career. I do find it hard to believe, though, that one review is going to make or break anyone; it’s only in the context of the weight of opinion that it could possibly matter. That said, as professionals we do not hand out praise and rebuke as barter, party favors, or coals in the Christmas stocking. We’re only telling it as we heard it. Moreover, the people who create, present, and perform the music the public hears are certainly the subject of our attention, but they are not the object: the object is information for the broader public. We depend for our legitimacy not on the rise or fall in the market value of composers and performers but on the public’s trust that we tell as accurately as we can what is happening in the world of classical music hereabouts.

It is a fair comment that a reviewer didn’t get the point of what he or she described, and therefore that the opinion was not soundly based. That, of course, can be as true of a good review as a bad one, though we’re not terribly likely to hear about it in the former case. One must, however, take with a grain of salt the contention from the object of a “bad” review that the analysis of the music or the performance must be faulty. To maintain that sort of attitude, if anyone does, would be a bit… unprofessional. It is certainly possible (and probably usually the case) that a dissatisfied reviewer got the point perfectly well but didn’t think the point was adequately communicated. Or, perhaps, that the point wasn’t valid, in which case I think the reviewer owes a more detailed explanation. De gustibus and all that.

What is perfectly understandable, perfectly reasonable, perfectly satisfactory, is an expression of pleasure that a reviewer enjoyed the performance and/or the piece, or regret that the reviewer didn’t. An expression like that does not imply any sort of quid pro quo, dependency, or right answer/wrong answer dichotomy. Glad you liked it; sorry you didn’t. Next time maybe you’ll see things the same way or differently.

Fine by me.

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 MEE series, like Monadnock Music, is structured a little differently from some of the others; it is a moveable feast. MEE hits several different towns in Essex County: Peabody, Danvers, Salem, Gloucester, Hamilton. In addition, it consists of four programs, each given multiple times in a particular month, June through September. Thus, the program we saw on Tuesday in Danvers had already played in Salem at an open rehearsal, and on Monday night in Peabody; it will repeat on Saturday, June 26 at the Gloucester Art Association.

The performances were arrayed on Tuesday in order of expanding instrumental forces, beginning with the only true chamber work among Heitor Villa-Lobos’s nine-work Bachianas Brasileiras series. Although No. 6, dating from 1938, may by now be the second-most performed of the series, after the phenomenally popular No. 5 for soprano and eight celli, it trails that one by a very large measure. That’s too bad, because the use of only two lines of music affords an opportunity to appreciate the fusion of Baroque and Brazilian elements in its purest form. The problem with that degree of concentration and exposure is that the resultant performance can be rather dry and fussy. What we heard performed by flutist Orlando Cela and bassoonist Neil Fairbairn was anything but; in fact, it was possibly the best we’ve heard, live or on recording, full of both perky, bustling movement (mostly in the flute, to whom Villa-Lobos allotted most of the short note values) and soulful cantilena (mostly in the bassoon—see? it can be done!)

The Reger Serenade, op. 77a dates from 1904 (77b was a string trio, a totally different piece); there was a second, in G, in 1915. The instrumentation, according to violist Mark Berger’s oral program note, was modeled after Beethoven’s op. 25 in the same key. As Reger works go, this one is fairly light in mood and texture. It is not, however, entirely devoid of the harmonic slipperiness of which he was so fond, but in this case it holds attention through melodic clarity and even, in the first movement, hints of country fiddling. The playing by Mr. Cela, Ms. Benotti on violin and Mr. Berger, was bright and friendly, lemonade on a summer day.

Before beginning to play Franz Krommer’s Quartet No. 2 in E-flat for bassoon, two violas, and cello, cellist Sarah Freiberg remarked how the composer, a contemporary of Mozart who outlived Beethoven, explored in the two numbers of his op. 46, written in 1804, the darker contours of string coloration, along with the unique properties of the bassoon. Berger also chimed in to say that “all violists dream of sitting in this seat”—that is, where the first violinist normally sits. The joke on both counts is that this work is all about the bassoon, giving the two violists (Ms. Benotti taking the second chair) nothing like the leading role the violins have in a string quartet, and, except for a bit in the finale, taking no advantage at all of the mood potential of the low string sonorities. The bassoon, however, gets a thorough workout, displaying its full range of registers and articulations (at least insofar as they were used in the early 19th century—nothing like Rite of Spring here!). Mr. Fairbairn provided an excellent compendium, from flashy toccata techniques babbling away in the outer movements, a lush lyricism in the slow movement, and classic guffawing and octave displacements in the minuet. It’s too bad Krommer wasn’t a better composer: too often the music relies on galant style chromatic melody bending rather than any striking harmonic movement.

The focus of MEE’s publicity for its June program quite properly was the premiere performances of John Wallace’s Structures, for the entire ensemble. According to the composer’s program note, (the only note printed in the program book), which he summarized orally at the concert, the work commemorates five Essex County buildings dating from the mid-17th through the early-19th centuries, the three oldest of which have associations with the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. Complementing these physical structures he has imposed corresponding musical structures on the five movements: Rebecca Nurse’s four-room house begets a four-sectioned movement, with patterns of eight and 40 standing in for her eight children and 40 friends who petitioned on her behalf — unsuccessfully; the finale’s depiction of the First Religious Society’s Newburyport meetinghouse attempts a structure approximating the spire; and so forth. The listing of the five movements does not give tempo indications, but they are all slow. The idiom is a kind of lyric atonality; the writing for the instruments is grateful enough, fairly straightforwardly within standard playing techniques—we detected, for example, only one instance of coloristic string effects, a bit of misterioso, sul ponticello tremolo. In short, there was very little here by which one could get a handle on the composer’s thoughts about these buildings, their inhabitants, or their histories. The second movement, for example, concerned Nathaniel Felton, Sr.’s abode in Peabody. Felton was an ardent supporter of John Proctor, one of the Salem accused. Ought one not to expect some vigorous oppositional drama here? The third movement, depicting the famous House of Seven Gables in Salem, had nothing of Hawthorne about it. The fourth had as its subject the house of Rev. John Wise of Essex, a Revolutionary firebrand, yet it emitted no heat and precious little light. Bottom line, this struck us as a missed opportunity and a pretty sterile exercise in academic hermeticism. The five MEE performers seem to have rehearsed the work thoroughly, and sounded entirely on top of their parts, poor dears.

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.

View of Shalin Liu Performance Center from Sandy Bay (BMInt staff photo)

On Father’s Day, June 20, we took in a program dedicated in memory of Rockport Music Artistic Director David Deveau’s father, Charles. It consisted of late-19th-century works of varying coloration performed by a variety of musicians with little formal connection to one another (except in two cases by marriage) other than that most of them were known to and admired by the late Deveau, Sr. Duo pianists Leslie Amper and Randall Hodgkinson performed Gabriel Fauré’s Dolly Suite for piano four hands; the Pittsburgh Symphony’s concertmaster, Andrés Cárdenes, and its principal cellist, Anne Martinson Williams, joined David Deveau on piano for Anton Arensky’s Piano Trio in D minor; and Cárdenes and Williams teamed with violinist Joana Genova and violists Katherine Murdock and Ariel Rudiakov in the Brahms String Quintet No. 2 in G major, op. 111.

Raoul Bardac, son of Sigismund and Emma Moyse Bardac, was the unwitting catalyst of his mother’s two major extramarital affairs: Raoul, having studied piano with his neighbor Gabriel Fauré, introduced him to his mother in the 1890s and successfully replicated the experiment with his subsequent teacher, Claude Debussy, in 1903. (After his parents’ understandable divorce in 1905, Emma married Debussy in 1908.) According to Roger Nichols’s biography of Debussy, Emma was a talented singer and sparkling conversationalist. At any rate, Fauré was captivated, and for Emma he composed his La bonne chanson, and in honor of Raoul’s younger sister Hélène (1892-1985), nicknamed Dolly, he wrote his only work for piano four hands, the Dolly Suite, between 1893 and 1896 (the first number, “Berceuse,” he adapted from an early work). The individual pieces of the suite, after the opening lullaby, are “Mi-a-ou,” referring not to a cat but to the way Dolly pronounced her brother’s name; “Dolly’s Garden”; “Kitty’s waltz” (referring to a dog, not a cat; don’t ask); “Tenderness”; and “Spanish Dance.” The writing is mostly straightforwardly lyrical, although “Dolly’s Garden” (which also has one of Fauré’s sweetest tunes) offers some surprising harmonic byways, the waltz has a delightfully off-kilter short-long rhythm, and the Spanish Dance, very clearly influenced by Emmanuel Chabrier’s España, also improves on it with subtler and more original harmonization. Amper and Hodgkinson obtained from Rockport Music’s spanking-new Steinway an impeccable clarity of line and phrase, with all inner voices clearly articulated. This is appealing but not deep music, so it pretty well plays itself expressively—or at least that’s how Amper and Hodgkinson made it appear, to their great credit.

A year or two ago, when WHRB was on its summer auto-pilot (we call its not-always-fully-synchronized, computer-driven jukebox the “Harv-O-Matic”), one of the items in repertory was the sole piano trio of Anton Arensky (1861-1906). The commentary repeated, perforce each time, Rimsky-Korsakov’s assessment that Arensky’s music would enter the dustbin of history, the enduring popularity of the Trio being in its way confirmation of that prophecy for the rest of Arensky’s œuvre. Rimsky’s asperity might be attributable to Arensky’s confirmed Westernism—he was a devotee of the Tchaikovskian rather than the nationalist tendency in Russian music. Now that other Westernist composers like Anton Rubinstein and Nikolai Medtner are undergoing a bit of revival, it might be time to go digging through that dustbin on behalf of poor Arensky.

Meanwhile, the Trio remains a popular and critical favorite: its opening movement, in impeccable sonata form, has a catchy main tune whose melodic shape is perhaps made more memorable by its anachronistic similarity to a certain Beatles song. The following scherzo is also a popular number, with a tricky violin part that must leap between spiccato and pizzicato, with some harmonics thrown in for good measure. The scherzo’s trio section features a dialogue between a galumphing piano and some Viennese schmalz in the strings—a wonderful effect, but from the players’ facial expressions, only Deveau seemed to be getting the joke. The Trio, as is often the case with pieces of its era, is given structural unity by overt and covert repetition of melodies between movements: here the slow movement’s main theme resembles the first movement’s opening one in outline, and the motto tune reappears in propria persona as a wistful memory in the finale.

Cárdenes, Deveau, and Williams offered no great musical revelations, but the performance was rock-solid and, with a few minor cavils, persuasive. From where we sat, in the right-hand balcony (we have urged RM management to seat us in various places around the hall so we can better sample the acoustic and other properties of their new space), in all but the last movement Mr. Cárdenes seemed under-powered in contrast to his colleagues. This seems not to be a localized acoustic phenomenon, as we had similar reports from listeners seated elsewhere. We know that the room’s acoustics promote the lower strings; the piano had always seemed neutral, but Deveau kept the lid fully up for the Trio, which may have contributed to overwhelming the violin. This imbalance of sound was quite apart from matters of clarity—Mr. Cárdenes’s sweet and pure sound could be distinctly heard. Thus, violinists, note well: if your name isn’t already Itzhak Perlman, better crank up the volume at the Shalin Liu.

There are those who regard the String Quintet No. 2 in G, op. 111 to be Brahms’s finest chamber work. Certainly, it was written at the height of his powers, in 1890, and is a marvel of compactness, alongside the radical compression of his op. 8 piano trio he engineered in 1889. In his comprehensive, if somewhat contentious, survey of all Brahms’s chamber music, Daniel Gregory Mason observed that a careful balance of volume and tempo in the opening movement was necessary to clarify the respective roles of the main opening theme in the cello and its subsidiary motif of a rising third, which later takes on great prominence. By Mason’s standards, the performance Sunday would have appeared too fast and too strongly emphasizing the rippling accompaniment. Williams, however, did her bit to sing out the main tune and although the passage introducing the rising third did get short shrift, it was partly compensated by the ensemble’s taking an exposition repeat. To us, this issue of balance highlights one of the perils of ad hoc ensembles’ taking on standard repertory works that have been so well explored by groups that have performed with each other for many years. That said, this was overall a very fine performance; Brahms allocates many of his key melodies here to the violas, and Murdock and Rudiakov were very much present and accounted for. Although from where we sat we could not see them at all, their lines were perfectly clear and resonant, as indeed were everyone else’s, not excluding Genova. The somewhat oddly constructed (no real second theme) slow movement, with its principal motif that sounds more like Grieg than Brahms, was taken at a pace that emphasized its lyricism, sometimes at the expense of depth, except in the radiant coda. The intermezzo (What, you want a scherzo from Brahms? Ha!) and finale were solidly if not epiphanically played, although the suddenly gypsified coda to the finale was duly given the full-court press, to immoderate audience approbation.

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 opener was Michael Gandolfi’s Grooved Surfaces, a 1996 BMV commission, whose title derived from half-finished road construction but whose three movements limned a groove of other kinds in a jazzy and engaging exploration of African drumming techniques, pentatonic ostinati and giddy cross-rhythms, respectively. Against these basic grooves Gandolfi filled the air with rolling, hopping, clattering patter, utterly charming.

There followed what was for us the unexpected highlight of the evening, John Cage’s Credo in US, an earlyish (1942) piece originally (natch) a dance score for Merce Cunningham, in which Cage adumbrated his later involvement with found-object sounds and chance procedures. In this case he integrated these ideas, expressed in percussion utilizing tin cans and cued pre-recorded sound (here a CD of Dvorak’s New World Symphony—the scherzo, if anyone cares—though it could have been any recording of a European classic work or even a radio broadcast), into music for piano (both “normal,” usually jazzy, and muted with hands and sticks, often in pentatonic patterns) and other percussion, including a cymbal muted by being laid on foam. Despite what for modern ears must sound like a pretty square rhythmic structure, this all came together in a touching affirmation of American anarchic multifariousness against the Nietzschean nihilism and monolithic ideologies forcefully arrayed against us in World War II. A special shout-out here is due to pianist Geoffrey Burleson, who seamlessly integrated the conventional and muted sounds, and did extra duty on a tom-tom, adding a further layer of Native American effects.

The program’s first half closed with the most significant music of the evening, arrangements by Pittman of five songs by Charles Ives, those designated as “Street Songs and Pieces” in the composer’s 114 Songs. These were, in anthology order, “Old Home Day,” “In the Alley,” A Son of a Gambolier,” “Down East” and “The Circus Band.” Instead of this order, Pittman sensibly presented them with first and last reversed, a more dramatically suitable sequence. This also gets them in more closely chronological order, the first three from the 1890s and the last two just after World War I. Although Ives listed the texts as “Traditional,” to paraphrase a line from “Circus Band,” those golden words were all his own. Although Pittman’s ordering was sound on dramatic grounds (about which more later), it also helps focus on the evolution of Ives’s esthetics and his artistic maturation. The early pieces date from Ives’s Yale days and are relatively straightforward and jocular in tone—in a footnote to “In the Alley” Ives claims to have included it “to help clear up a long disputed point, namely: which is worse, the music or the words?”—but even in these, young Ives was experimenting with off-accents and stretched rhythms to capture both the cadences of conversational speech and the breathless tone of the narrator, as in “Circus Band.” The later songs are not at all straightforward, despite quoting from familiar tunes and the absence of Ives’s most strident harmonies: they are set as frame tales, with dreamy and nostalgic openings, and occasional internal passages, evoking earlier times in rueful recognition that the Great War had rent the very fabric of social time.

Pittman’s arrangements accomplished several things. One was to unpack some of Ives’s dense piano textures and, with the aid of the clear acoustic of Shalin Liu Performance Center, clarify lines that might otherwise get lost. The other, much more obvious, was to give out a “grand and glorious noise,” beginning right at the beginning as most of the ensemble marched down the aisle in imitation of the circus band, including Pittman on bass drum and cymbal. Among the other highlights of orchestration was the very literal rendition of an obbligato Ives wrote into “Gambolier” and designated “Kazoo Chorus.” Needless to say, all these high-jinks were performed (including some unison singing) with enormous gusto by the ensemble, which in the case of violinist Bayla Keyes could be termed an understatement. Ms. Dellal, for the most part singing what poetically is a boy’s voice, was all Rocket J. Squirrel spunky, with excellent diction (although at times even she was submerged by waves of instrumental sound), and, in the later numbers, with affecting tenderness.

The second half (there was an encore, but we will not follow Click and Clack’s example by calling that the “third half”) was entirely given over to works commissioned by BMV, the first of which was the 2007 Four Vignettes by Gunther Schuller. The composer introduced the work from the stage, ending with a disquisition on the various sources of musical inspiration: the first movement, “Atmospherics,” from a starry sky, into which all the instruments save the piano escape at the end; the second, “Capriccio,” a study in many-layered cross-rhythms, seemed to come from nowhere; the third, “Dreamscape: Found Objects,” another quiet and static piece with irruptions, from an exhibition of Dali paintings; and the fourth, “Scherzo Fantastico,” from Liszt’s similarly named late piano works. The four numbers were all brief, and none of them plumbed any great depths, but provided diverting splashes of instrumental color and texture. The concluding scherzo, featuring ersatz celesta (a real one was called for but Kurzweil afforded a satisfactory substitute) and glockenspiel, had a kind of Disneyesque manic cheerfulness.

The nominal finale was Steven Stucky’s Boston Fancies, which BMV obtained from the then-young composer in 1985. Stucky set this up as a kind of chorus-and-verse operation on the order of a concerto grosso, where the choruses, designated ritornelli but not literally repeated, punctuated with a bright and forward-driving energy a series of “fancies,” in the old English musical sense of contrapuntal fantasias, which featured sub-groupings of the ensemble, rather Dowlandesque and dreamy. There were lovely sonorities and sound bending, with fine work from flute, clarinet, cello and percussion. This work, though not new, was unfamiliar to us, and we would be happy to hear it again—only not at the end of a long program.

Did we say end? We exaggerated, as BMV actually concluded what we fear had become an unconscionably long program—made longer by oral program notes before every piece (there were fine written ones by Sandra Hyslop)—with an excerpt on the theme of Old King Cole (with a rather egregious tip of the hat to the Nat King Cole Trio of revered memory) from Bernard Hoffer’s Ma Goose for narrator (Ms. Dellal) and ensemble, which BMV commissioned for one of its family concert programs. It was, we must report, sprightly and entertaining for its purpose, if a bit overwrought ditto, but we confess we were not merry old souls when it began and became no more so when it ended.

The performances by Pittman and the ensemble were all tip-top. There were the peripatetic Bayla Keyes on violin, Peter Sulski, viola (in the Stucky), Jan Müller-Szeraws, cello (great tone and wonderful seagull glissandi in both the Schuller and Stucky), Ann Bobo, flute, William Kirkley, clarinet, Burleson, piano, and the ever-moving Robert Schulz, percussion. Apart from Burleson and Pittman, Kirkley served as auxiliary percussionist and Ann Bobo DJ’ed the Dvorak in the Cage.

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 have been devoting, for what we trust are obvious reasons, more than normal space in these columns to the physical and sonic attributes of RM’s new hall. To our earlier physical description we would like to add mention of one other item, which is the upper space of the hall. This features diagonal metal trusses attached to oppositely angled beams, creating a very pleasantly arched effect that acknowledges traditional design formulations without slavishly copying them. We understand that the trusses are backed by some removable sound-dampening material so that they can contribute to the tuning of the room.

This leads to a consideration of what seems to be developing into a sharp difference of opinion about the hall’s sound qualities, with many admiring the carrying power and clarity of the sound and others decrying a perceived deadness of sound, resulting from the carefully calibrated reverberation. One audience member described hearing the Borromeos performing some of the same pieces they played Saturday on earlier occasions at Jordan Hall and remembering the latter to be much softer, warmer and blended in sound. It may well be that those who prefer listening to recordings on LPs to those on CDs will have issues with the emphasis the hall places on clarity. We spoke after the concert to Yeesun Kim, the Borromeo’s cellist, who acknowledged a touch of dryness to the sound but nothing she felt she had to fight; she was most pleased by the clarity and projection. Fortunately, the room’s designed-in tuning capabilities give RM a chance to mess with our ears a bit until as near everyone as possible can be mollified.

The concert itself could not have been chosen better to highlight the pluses  and—if you so regard them—minuses of the Shalin Liu. The quartet (Nicholas Kitchen and Kristopher Tong, violins, Mai Motobuchi, viola, and Ms. Kim, cello) began with perhaps the most carefree of Beethoven’s op. 18 quartets, the No. 2 in G major. From the get-go the Borromeos illustrated exactly what it is that chamber music fans love about the genre, when performed by groups that have, through years of interaction, become well accustomed to one another: here was a dinner conversation in which every voice was distinctly heard (OK, not exactly like every dinner conversation to which we’ve been a party) and to which each contributed to the fuller understanding of a subject. The scherzo, interrupted near the beginning by a string malfunction quickly corrected, was the epitome of winsome jocularity. The slow movement gave the occasion for well-blended ensemble, while the finale was taken with brio but restrained dynamics. The players threw themselves into the spirit of the piece, quite literally at points, punctuating the ends of phrases with great uplifts of bows and feet (the music, among Beethoven’s most Haydnesque, moves through the silence at these points with pure harmonic propulsion). One hates to see musicians on stage holding themselves in place like statues, but sometimes body English can be carried too far—nuff said.

Mark Kilstofte, a seasoned composer age 52 who was a student of William Bolcom among others, and who now teaches at Furman University in North Carolina, composed his second quartet in 1988, so it is not spanking new, but it and its composer were new to us (the Borromeos have, so we’re told, performed it in Boston before). It is a solid, engaging work apparently entirely monothematic, based on an opening-wedge-shaped motif. Mr. Kitchen supplemented the printed program notes with an illustrated discussion of the various transformations this melodic idea takes. “Not a tune from home,” he acknowledged, but sufficiently memorable to keep the listener engaged and interested in its progress. And progress it did, from barely (but clearly) audible scrapings into choo-choo propulsion, thence into lush mock-Rachmaninovia. The slow movement presents it first in a harmonically static setting, with a two-note rocking module that gradually expands to three notes, and so on to end with a rush of sound from the viola. (We should take this opportunity to praise Ms. Motobuchi, whose work throughout was exceptional). Perhaps a head-nod to, or spoof of, minimalism at work here? The scherzo, all pizzicato punctuated with loud Bartók string-snaps, was intended, it says right here, as a joke, but this seemed less successful, although a few false endings earned some chuckles. The finale began with lots of rhythmic drive and a good many notes sul ponticello (near, or on, the bridge). The two-note rocking motif returned, this time in a clear pool of tonal harmony, before the recapitulation. (Mr. Kilstofte is not afraid to use older forms.) The big ending came, but to our ears, not big enough.

The program finale brought to the stage the Swiss-born and Juilliard-trained Gilles Vonsattel, a former student of RM’s artistic director David Deveau, in the Brahms Piano Quintet in F minor op. 34. This is the mother of all piano quintets: long, serious, intense. For the first time, we wondered if the hall might not be suitable for music like this, since the first movement proceeded as if through a veil: the dynamics were oddly subdued and the combination of the tonal clarity and the calibrated precision of the players, especially Mr. Vonsattel, dried out not just the sonority but also the work’s effect. The slow movement brought from the performers an uncommon delicacy, and while the “scherzo” (never an easy or unambiguous concept for Brahms) yields some thunderous passages, it was the softer ones that made the greatest impression and seemed to draw from the players their finest ensemble tone. The finale, however, with its drawn-out introduction that eventually seizes control of the whole movement, was a pure triumph, piercing the veil and grabbing the audience by the lapels.

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, on the whole, was very good, but we need to put it in context of space and time. The new hall, built for RM on the site and in stylistic imitation of the Victorian, Second Empire commercial building that was there (at least on its street-side facade), is on the inside and on its harbor-facing exterior a stunningly beautiful building. Designed by architects Alan Joslin and Deborah Epstein and acoustician Lawrence Kirkegaard, the structure comprises three stories (a mezzanine houses the sound and audiovisual tech works), of which two service the concert hall and the top level offers a grand reception hall. The basement contains further service units and the green room.

The most immediately striking feature of the traditionally shoebox-shaped 330-seat hall is the huge window wall at the back of the stage, looking out into Rockport Harbor. On dreary Thursday, the rainy, brooding gray sky and turbid sea provided an arresting backdrop. Too bad the hall’s too small to stage Peter Grimes! Almost as striking is what you see if the sun is too bright, or the night too dark (reflections of auditorium lights too distracting), to keep the window in view: a magnificent set of screens of wood woven over metal verticals, slide (by hand for now, eventually electrically) across to cover it. This woven motif is carried over in the design of the balcony railings, and the woodwork in general, of fir and walnut, richly adorns all areas of the premises. The walls of granite brick, intended to echo the granite wharf outside the window, are set in a textured matrix so as to create an irregular sound-diffusing surface. All this is a fusion of the aesthetic and the practical, amid myriad other details ? the high volume/low velocity air system, the insulation between green room practice space, outside street noise, harbor sounds, and the hall, that enhance the acoustic properties of the hall and concentrate the aural experience of performer and audience. To this add the careful calibration of reverberation (1.5 seconds, 0.3 less than Symphony Hall), the open sight lines, the tuneability of the space, the clean and clear sound system for amplified or broadcast material (RM intends to use the space for Met simulcasts, movies, and other A/V purposes in the colder months), and you can readily appreciate that the generous donors to this extraordinary construction project in what we must acknowledge is an out-of-the-way locale have gotten a state-of-the-art facility that will entice many to come.

To say all this, which is high praise, is not to say that there aren’t issues. Sounds do not diffuse uniformly throughout the space. We noticed, along one side of the room, a boost to sounds coming from that side of the stage (in our case, the flute in the Copland) that were better balanced elsewhere in the room, per the testimony of other listeners. Sight lines in the sides of the balcony have not ameliorated the problems one experiences in the analogous spots in Symphony Hall, so RM has adopted the BSO’s solution,  making those seats cheaper. The stage, which now can accommodate a small chamber orchestra, is not matched by the green room, which, while well appointed, is inadequate for more than a standard chamber group. Our unsurprising conclusion: nothing is perfect. We can all applaud the magnificence of what has come from the commitment of this organization and this community—exemplified by Shalin Liu herself, who addressed the audience and received its gratitude—without claiming for it the crown of perfection.

Oh yes, there was a concert that took place here. The concept behind the program,  articulated by Deveau, was the consecration of the house. While the stage was not big enough to seat an orchestra to play Beethoven’s overture of that name, the pieces presented all related to the idea of “new house, new beginning.” For openers, the Wagner Siegfied Idyll, written to commemorate the Wagner family’s new house on Cosima’s birthday (Christmas, yet), was presented in the original scoring for the 13 players arrayed on the staircase leading to her bedroom. As the first public test of the hall’s acoustics, the performance conformed to the room: clear and warm. The players, including the Borromeo Quartet and many BSO principals, were both clearly individuated and richly blended, as if combining the defining characteristics of digital and analog recording. The room plainly loves the strings—not a bad proposition for chamber music—and it brings out the richest of bass sonorities, both from bassist Edwin Barker and cellist Yeesun Kim. A good thing, we thought, that chamber music does not as a rule require multiple contrabasses. There were a few instances of first-night jitters, especially from the brasses, but overall we were pleased with the calmly flowing output from the ensemble and Mr. Hangen’s lucid direction.

After the (relatively) large ensemble demonstrated the hall’s capacity to differentiate and blend sonorities, the first half of the program concluded with the type of chamber ensemble for which the Rockport Chamber Music Festival has made its reputation, in Scott Wheeler’s piano trio, whose title and creation give witness to the occasion. Full disclosure: Mr. Wheeler and your correspondent are long-time friends and colleagues. Having said this, candor requires that we declare “Granite Coast” one of his strongest scores. As is his wont, the composer has structured the work around a bit of technical trickery, in this case the musical spelling of the names of Ms. Liu and Mr. Deveau. This resulted in a motif he described as fanfare, characterized by a descending major third and a following major second, snapping back. Another feature was a figure of a descending and ascending fourth, often in a dotted rhythm. From these, Wheeler spun a compelling developmental structure to the first movement. The work’s title gives the idea of where Wheeler is going with this, and the stony rendering of the fanfare in piano octaves is brought forward in extended dry pizzicato passages for the strings. The slow movement is slow in pulse, but not gentle, and it makes many references to Chinese pentatonicism and sonorities of traditional Chinese instruments, in tribute to Ms. Liu. The finale returns to the melodic ideas of the first movement and develops them with reference to Rockport’s aqueous environment, in rhythmically vital ways, notably with a rocking motion in the lower piano range while the strings float about in choppy waters, with the occasional suggestion of a sea shanty. It all comes to an end with a wonderful imitation of seagulls. Wheeler is ever willing to let the circumstances of an occasion suggest the ideas for a work, but at his best, as he was here, he seizes these ideas and makes of them an abstract composition of enduring value.

The big band (a slightly different one, no brasses this time and multiple strings, plus piano) returned for the program’s finale, the original chamber scoring of Aaron Copland’s great masterpiece, the ballet score to what was eventually called Appalachian Spring. This 1944 work was the distillation of Copland’s Americanist idiom, and although the circumstances of its creation are only ambiguously related to the dance scenario to which it was ultimately put, the story line of Pennsylvania Shakers who build and occupy a new house neatly fits the occasion of this concert. Mr. Hangen led a tight, controlled yet lively performance. Paula Robison’s flute solos and descants were gorgeous, though we suspect that peculiarities of the hall’s acoustic gave them greater prominence in our seating area than they may have had elsewhere.

For the sake of our narrative we have mostly avoided listing all the performers, but now is the time to scroll the credits for those we have not previously mentioned. The Wagner ensemble comprised Ms. Robison; John Ferrillo, oboe; William and Catherine Hudgins, clarinets; Richard Svoboda, bassoon; Eric Ruske and Laura Carter, French horns; Thomas Rolfs, trumpet; the Borromeo Quartet (Nicholas Kitchen and Kristopher Tong, violins; Mai Motobuchi, viola; Ms. Kim, cello) and Mr. Barker. The Copland ensemble consisted of Ms. Robison, Mr. Hudgins, Mr. Svoboda, the Borromeos plus Sarah Peters and Li-mei Liang, violins, Stephanie Fong, viola, Jing Li, cello, Mr. Barker, and William Ransom, piano.

See related article 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 venue, new to us, is a decommissioned Roman Catholic church of French or French-Canadian roots — the stained-glass windows bore French titles — that is now used by a congregation that, according to its literature, has among its missions a commitment to the arts. To this end, among others, the interior has softened many of the hard surfaces: there are wall-to-wall carpeting, pews replaced with cushioned chairs, and an array of sound reflectors hanging from the stuccoed ceiling that are reminiscent of the devices at New York’s Avery Fisher (né Philharmonic) Hall that were dubbed “clouds.” (Remember Peter Schickele’s quip, “It’s a beautiful night for a concert, there’s not a cloud in the ceiling”?) With all this attention paid to acoustics, one would anticipate a bright, forward sound, eliminating the cavernous long decays and sonic muddle one experiences in other large church spaces. One would be partially correct and partially not: the reverb is gone, all right, but so is any hint of brightness—in fact, projection is a serious problem and upper partials can turn anemic.

The program opened with Emerald Waltz by Lisa Bielawa, a rising star who is now off at the American Academy in Rome, enjoying the fruits of her Rome Prize. The stone of the title is the anniversary stone for 35 years, signaling the specificity of this self-styled occasional work. It begins with a rush of what the composer called aleatoric but what sounded to us like dense Ligeti-esque chromatic polyphony, settling into a jazzy, user-friendly waltz idiom that occasionally stumbles over a leftover 5/4 bar. It’s all over before you know it, a better sensation, one supposes, than its opposite, but the materials seemed sturdy enough to benefit from more extended treatment. Ms. Woods conducts with nice big beats; her background in community and youth orchestras stands her in good stead.

The solo turn for this concert was Rafael Popper-Keizer in Saint-Saëns’s Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor, op. 33. The two Saint-Saëns concertos (No. 2 is far less known) are not performed as often as others by the Romantic masters, and the First’s fate, though hardly an unknown work, is especially puzzling, as it was highly regarded by the composer’s contemporaries and in the succeeding generation. Perhaps the problem (more for soloists than audiences, we suspect) is that it doesn’t have much in the way of big-bow wow moments — no flashy cadenzas and not a lot of bravura passagework, although there are some obviously tricky runs of harmonics. It is therefore welcome to have Popper-Keizer, a well-known figure on the local scene as orchestral and chamber musician, take this on. He cannot, however, keep a poker face: when something has gone quite to his satisfaction, he shines a big smile, and when the untoward happens, which it did once or twice, we sense his puzzlement. Quite charming and human, in its way.

It is hard to think of Saint-Saëns as a musical radical, but he structured this concerto in some ways on the precedent of Liszt’s piano concertos, as a single unit with subsections corresponding to conventional movements, all played without pause but with clear bridges. The content, however, is pure Saint-Saëns: melodic, pellucid, concise, unfussy, and scored with a transparency as close as the Romantics got to Haydn and Mozart, though amply endowed with drama and narrative force. It’s really remarkable how these characteristics remained constant throughout Saint-Saëns’s long career. We won’t describe the music—it is in many respects archetypal, and in any case you can hear and even download it here as a recording or here as sheet music. Popper-Keizer adopted an appropriately forward tone in the first movement, but alas, the room acoustic worked against him like a headwind: the sounds reaching the ear, only four rows back, did not match the intensity of the sights reaching the eye. Woods kept her forces, somewhat reduced in keeping with the light scoring, together, with only the slow movement’s delicate opening to remind us that the CSO is a no-audition all-comers community ensemble.

The program concluded with Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, one of the great musical warhorses and a favorite crowd-pleaser. About the music, again, we need say nothing. For this brilliantly scored work, the CSO rose to its full complement; therein lay the trouble. As we said earlier, Ms. Woods is adept at giving clear signals, and she was largely successful in keeping her ducks in a row, everyone in line and moving forward. We noted with pleasure some fine wind and brass playing, with kudos to clarinets, flutes, bassoons and low brass. Sometimes, with community orchestras, especially ones as civic-minded as CSO, one has to choose between that commitment and quality of product. So, while the Berlioz performance was not geared to the cognoscenti, the concert at least made up in considerable degree with some intelligent out-of-the-ordinary programming; that’s worth praise in and of itself.

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.