Cactus Pear Music Festival
Revelations from Prague, and points east
July 11, 2011The Cactus Pear Music Festival opened its 15th season in customarily fine fettle with top-drawer performances of works from on and off the beaten path, played by musicians drawn from throughout the country.
The sanctuary of Coker United Methodist Church, decidedly off the beaten path for urbanites but convenient to the populous North Side, was gratifyingly well filled for the season’s first two concerts, July 7 and 9. The two programs together formed a cohesive unit, opening and closing in the familiar Germanic territory of Mozart and Brahms but touching on relatively underexposed Central and Eastern European composers in between.
The chief revelation, on the july 7 program, was an 1893 work by Zdenek Fibich, a Czech composer with German musical leanings. Little-noticed today, Fibich enjoyed considerable success in the late 19th century, principally as a composer for the theater (seven operas, incidental music for numerous plays) and both the singing and the speaking voice (many songs and choral works, along with nine “melodramas” for narrator and instruments). But he also wrote three symphonies, much music for solo piano and a fair amount of chamber music.
I can’t recall having heard anything by Fibich before this Cactus Pear concert, but the Quintet in D proved an admirable work. It’s unusually scored, for violin, cello, clarinet, horn and piano, and Fibich made expert use of the wide color palette. The music is generously lyrical and often sweet, but never cloyingly so. It is very well made and structurally sophisticated. The opening allegro begins as an ingratiating waltz with hints of the salon, but as it develops it becomes much more ambitious and complex. The dreamy slow movement recalls the nature sounds of the “Forest Murmurs” from Wagner’s “Siegfried.”
The scherzo is a jocular danse macabre interrupted by two easy-going trios. The closing allegro again reveals subtle Wagnerian roots in its flashes of chromatic harmony and dramatic modulations. If we didn’t know that Fibich had composed operas, we might suspect it from the interaction of the violin and cello, virtually a soprano-tenor duet without words.
Pianist Jeffrey Sykes, a Cactus Pear stalwart from the beginning, evidently championed the Fibich quintet’s inclusion on the program -- he spoke passionately about the music and was the only member of the ensemble who had played it previously. His colleagues in the spirited, polished performance were Carmit Zori (violin), Anthony Ross (cello), Ilya Shterenberg (clarinet) and Jeff Garza (horn).
The Hungarian Zoltan Kodaly is a little better-known than Fibich, thanks mainly to the orchestral suite from the opera “Hary Janos” and the “Dances of Galanta.” The Duo for Violin and Cello, composed in 1914, is a deeply expressive and passionate work, pervaded by the clipped rhythms and serpentine melodic contours of Hungarian folk idioms. It also inspired the single most memorable performance of the festival thus far, by Mr. Ross and violinist Stephanie Sant’Ambrogio, the festival’s founder and artistic director. Both are consistently superior musicians, but their riveting, urgent account of the Kodaly piece was far beyond expectation. Both seemed totally at home in the lashing Hungarian rhythms, and both always found the right color inflections to drive the point home.
Ernst von Dohnanyi was a near contemporary of Kodaly’s and a fellow Hungarian, though his music is not so conspicuously folkloric in character. Dohnanyi’s Serenade in C for string trio, which opened the July 9 concert, has three robust movements alternating with two slow ones, a Romanza with wide, yearning melodic intervals and an elegiacal Theme and Variations that recalls Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden.” The splendid collaborators were Ms. Sant’Ambrogio, violist Dustin Budish and cellist Beth Rapier. (Dohnanyi’s Piano Quintet No. 1 closes the July 14 concert, providing more Dohnanyi in one week than I’ve heard in the past 20 years.)
Two Russians occupied the center of the July 9 program with sinuous, opulently beautiful works -- Anton Arensky’s cogitative Quartet No. 2 for violin (Ms. Sant’Ambrogio), viola (Aloysia Friedmann) and two cellos; and Aleksandr Glazunov’s wistful “Oriental Reverie” for clarinet and string quartet. Mr. Shterenberg, as ever, played the chantlike clarinet line masterfully.
Mr. Garza was in top form in Mozart’s Quintet in E-flat for horn, violin, two violas and cello, which opened the July 7 concert. He tossed of the finale’s fireworks with complete confidence. Ms. Sant’Ambrogio made a rare appearance on viola and sounded so beautiful in exposed passages that one wished she would play it more often.
Mr. Sykes was the powerful propeller of a big, muscular account of Brahms’s deeply dramatic Piano Quartet No. 3 in C Minor, which closed the July 9 concert. Ms. Zori’s poise and sense of line made a wonderful impression in the andante, as did the intensity of Ms. Friedmann and Mr. Ross throughout the piece. Sole complaint: The room’s problematic acoustics muddied the thicker textures.
The festival continues July 14 with music by Puccini, Mahler, Bizet, Arthur Foote and Dohnanyi; and July 16 with a baroque program. Both concerts begin at 7 pm.
Mike
Greenberg
