Camerata San Antonio
From England between the wars
March 8, 2010Camerata San Antonio on March 7 focused on English music from the decades between the 20th century’s two world wars. Edward Elgar’s extravagant Piano Quintet in A Minor and Gerald Finzi’s elegiacal song cycle “By Footpath and Stile,” for voice and string quartet, date from the first few years after the pause in hostilities. Benjamin Britten’s Three Divertimenti for String Quartet was composed in the mid-1930s.
In retrospect, it seems only Finzi’s songs, his first of an eventual six cycles on poems by Thomas Hardy, got the proper measure of the period. A sense of loss pervades them. Most are explicitly about death and its inevitability, but one deals with the loss of faith. Finzi’s music is gentle, pastoral, attuned to the English countryside and churchyards that inspired Hardy’s poems.
Baritone Ken-David Masur, who also serves as resident conductor of the San Antonio Symphony, sang Finzi’s songs with great clarity and unalloyed tonal beauty, especially in the upper register. As in a previous Camerata appearance, however, he conveyed little of the sense and weight of the texts.
Elgar’s quintet opens with foreboding and ends with triumphal glee. A lyrical, heartfelt adagio stands in the middle. The piece received a top-notch performance just last July during the Cactus Pear Music Festival. The Camerata account occupied equally high ground but may have been just a little more generously shaped in the adagio and more overwhelming in the finale, thanks in part to the assertive, powerful musicianship of pianist Melinda Lee Masur.
The excellent string quartet -- violinists Sayaka Okada and Matthew Zerweck, violist Emily Freudigman and cellist Kenneth Freudigman -- was on its own in Britten’s witty, affectionate character sketches. The first is an astringent March, the second a nostalgic but rather cheery Waltz, the finale a playful Burlesque. The performance was big and extrovert.
Mike
Greenberg
