Olmos Ensemble
Love leads, but laughter trumps
February 17, 2011Love was in the air for a night-after-Valentine’s Day concert by the Olmos Ensemble and assorted friends and spouses.
For the benefit of whatever yentas might have been present in First Unitarian Universalist Church, three of the pieces on the program were preceded by the how-we-met stories of the performing couples.
Baritone Ken David Masur was conducting the Bach Society of Columbia University when he needed someone to play the harpsichord. The result was a seven-year (so far) marriage to the excellent pianist Melinda Lee Masur. For the Olmos concert, they collaborated in songs of love by Robert and Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt’s “Es muss ein Wunderbares sein.”
At his best, Mr. Masur’s instrument has a limpid, open, honeyed quality that is very appealing. In this performance his top notes sounded constricted, but his lowest notes were round and resonant. Robert Schumann’s “Ich hab’ in mich gesogen,” which plumbs the low register, came off more winningly than the same composer’s high-flying “Intermezzo.” Mr. Masur infused great feeling into Clara Schumann’s “Liebst du um Schönheit” -- Gustav Mahler would later compose an orchestral setting of the same Friedrch Rückert poem.
Bassoonist Sharon Kuster and trumpeter James Kuster met in Veracruz, Mexico, where both were playing in the local orchestra. Their vehicle in this concert was a brief movement from Canadian bassoonist and composer Mathieu Lussier’s Double Concerto for Trumpet and Bassoon. As the Kusters have been married for 19 years, it can safely be assumed that they are more compatible with each other than their chosen instruments are. Mr. Lussier’s generically pleasant music for the two excellent soloists did little to advance the combination. The music was memorable mainly for the extreme busyness of the piano accompaniment, extracted from the original string orchestra score. Not even the splendid pianist Anne Epperson could transmute that torrent of notes into anything more than a torrent of notes.
Violinist Renia Shterenberg and clarinetist Ilya Shterenberg were both playing in the Charleston Symphony Orchestra when they met. Charleston is the setting of George Gershwin’s opera, “Porgy and Bess,” and the Shterenbergs gave an affectionate account of a too-brief suite from that opera arranged by Robert Russell Bennett.
Before joining flutist Tal Perkes in Charles-Marie Widor’s Suite, Op. 34, for flute and piano, Ms. Epperson clarified that she and Mr. Perkes were “not an item,” but that she was in love with his tone. Well she might be. Though the music was a tad verbose, as Widor’s better-known organ music is wont to be, the duo effectively captured the composer’s peculiar (some would say peculiarly French) fusion of sinuous eroticism and discursive rhetoric.
Jean Francaix had the last word with a perfectly zany profiterole of a piece, “The Shepherd’s Hour,” for woodwind quintet and piano. It’s a suite of three wicked, quickly sketched character studies of Parisian café denizens. “The Old Dandies” bleat satyrlike in sliding notes for the reeds amid anarchic revelry. “The Nervous Little Ones” scamper presto-spritzo. Between them stand “The Pin-Up Girls,” the clarinet line posing and moueing seductively and drawing a single-note leer from the muted horn. It’s probably the most explicitly funny music that Francaix ever produced, yet every bar proclaims compositional craftsmanship of a high order. Delivering the altogether delicious performance were Ms. Epperson, Mr. Shterenberg, Mr. Perkes, Ms. Kuster, hornist Jeff Garza and oboist Mark Ackerman.
Mike
Greenberg
