Olmos Ensemble with pianist Melinda Lee Masur: Obscure music, lustrous performances
June 4, 2008Not least of the virtues of the late-Romantic German composer Ludwig Thuille's Sextet for piano and winds, which closed the Olmos Ensemble's concert on June 3, was that it provided a showcase for the extraordinary musicianship of pianist Melinda Lee Masur.
Thuille's Sextet and the Wind Quintet in D by the equally obscure Josef Bohuslav Förster framed a reed trio by Georges Auric, much of whose music is very well known even if his name isn't. Despite the unfamiliar names on the program, the concert drew a good crowd to First Unitarian-Universalist Church.
Thuille's Sextet has two very different personalities. The first two movements are Brahmsian in their thick textures, warm harmonies and dark colors, though they don't approach Brahms in melody or intellectual brilliance. Then the music turns toward the ripe harmonies of Richard Strauss, a friend of Thuille's, in a charming gavotte and a bright lively finale.
Masur continually drew my attention, even when she was holding back and placing the piano line deep within the overall texture. There was real authority in the way she shaped and connected phrases, in her billowing dynamics, in her clean articulation and sure touch, with a particularly beautiful left hand. We have heard Masur once before, accompanying her husband, baritone Ken-David Masur, in some art songs on a Camerata San Antonio concert. (Ken-David Masur is also the resident conductor of the San Antonio Symphony.) But her work in the Thuille Sextet suggests that she would be a splendid solo recitalist.
Her colleagues, an elite crew of Olmos regulars, were flutist Tal Perkes, oboist Mark Ackerman, hornist Jeff Garza, bassoonist Sharon Kuster and clarinetist Ilya Shterenberg.
The same wind players opened the concert with Förster's Quintet in D, which was interesting for its enterprising juxtapositions. In the opening allegro, an ingratiating waltz alternates with declamatory material in duple meter. In the remarkable third movement, sprightly, sophisticated music recalling Mendelssohn's "Midsummernight Dream" scherzo is interrupted by a bumptious peasant dance. The music sometimes sounds Straussian, sometimes neoclassical. It never quite musters a good tune, though.
Musically the strongest piece on the program was Auric's lean, witty Trio for oboe, clarinet and bassoon. Auric is most widely known as a film composer. (Zsa-Zsa Gabor lip-synched his "Song from Moulin Rouge" in the 1952 movie by John Huston.) As a composer of chamber music, Auric was a fellow traveler with his countrymen Erik Satie and Francis Poulenc -- all serious craftsmen with serious purposes, but declining the German Romantic elixir of profundity. The middle movement of Auric's trio, titled "Romance," is a severe and ironic representative of that genre. All three movements reveal a highly refined understanding of counterpoint but never make a show of it. It's a delicious, bracing piece, and it was deliciously performed by Ackerman, Shterenberg and Kuster.
