For some reason, the string quartets of Felix Mendelssohn don’t have the currency on our chamber music stages that their quality deserves.
But all six of them, as well as the separate pieces for string quartet, are marvelous works, and it was with one of these pieces that the 23rd iteration of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival wrapped up last weekend.
It’s also worth nothing that the four musicians who played the Quartet No. 3 (in D, Op. 44, No. 1) — violinists Mei Mei Luo and Dina Kostic, violist Rene Reder and cellist Susan Moyer Bergeron — have been playing together as a quartet for more than a decade on these festival programs. In the past, they’ve given fine performances of the Phantasie of the short-lived British composer William Hurlstone and the Harp Quartet (No. 10 in E-Flat, Op. 74) of Beethoven. So for the purposes of this review I’ll call them the Festival Quartet.
Saturday night at the Eissey Campus Theatre in Palm Beach Gardens, the foursome brought lightness, muscle and fire to their reading of the Mendelssohn, winning enthusiastic acclaim from the audience of 200 or so. And it was well-deserved: The piece opens with one of the composer’s best themes, vigorous and virile, and the Festival Quartet took it at a good clip, easing up nicely for the contrasting theme that comes right after the entrance. Although this piece is not as tricky as say, late Beethoven, it does demand excellent technique and precise ensemble, all of which the four women displayed in abundance.
The ending of the first movement was a little perfunctory (it needed a bit more emphasis), but the second-movement minuet was lovely, with the musicians fully invested in this beautiful movement’s peaceful but ardent music. The slow movement was somewhat poky and cautious; it could have used a swifter tempo and some more urgency.
Perhaps that was just the setup the finale needed, with its headlong bustle and catchy tunes; the Festival Quartet was aggressive and commanding, with each player tearing off those unison triplets with intensity and power, and the fugal section toward the end full of the drama and expectation the music needs to be successful. It’s an interesting fact that after more than two decades of programs, largely of unfamiliar but worthy music, that audiences still seem to respond most warmly to canonical works like this.
The first half of the concert included a quintet for flute, harp and string trio by the French composer Jean Françaix. Although it was billed in the program as the Quintet No. 2 (written in 1989), it was in fact the Quintet No. 1, composed in 1934 and among Françaix’s most popular pieces. It’s not hard to hear why: It opens with a gorgeous, placid slow movement in which the flute at the bottom of its range plays an almost lullaby-like melody over gently moving accompaniment in strings and harp.
Flutist Karen Dixon, joined by harpist Deborah Fleisher along with Kostic, Reder and Bergeron, performed this movement as quietly as I’ve ever heard these musicians play, so quiet that it was almost distant. The effect was one of profound serenity, and made a most striking beginning to the quintet.
The lively Scherzo that came next has the feel of a song sung on a country stroll with guitar in hand, with its repeated waltz patterns in the harp and cheerful tunes in flute and strings, all played with verve and delicacy. Some of the opening mood returned for the Andante third movement, which begins with strings alone, and which had the same attention to soft dynamics and tenderness of expression.
The charming Rondo finale, based on an old French children’s song, had wit to spare in this performance, which overall was tasteful, elegant and accomplished. One had the feeling that while this music is meant to be graceful and entertaining, the musicians took it seriously nevertheless, and brought out everything it has to offer.
The concert opened with a staple of 20th-century Spanish music, the Seven Popular Spanish Songs of Manuel de Falla, perhaps better-known today in their numerous arrangements for various instruments than in their original vocal guise. Trumpeter Marc Reese was the soloist in this arrangement, accompanied by his wife, pianist Lisa Leonard.
The music requires a deft pianistic touch to set the mood of each song, and Leonard did that surpassingly well. Reese plays with a warm, large sound, more like a cornet than a trumpet, and he played each of these familiar, lovely pieces with directness and clarity. His most affecting playing may have been in the fourth song, Nana, mournful and beautiful, and well-suited for Reese’s mellow-toned approach.
Closing the first half was a rarity, the Trio Pathétique for clarinet, bassoon and piano of Mikhail Glinka, for which Leonard teamed with clarinetist Michael Forte and bassoonist Gabriel Beavers. This is early Glinka, heavily Italianate (it was composed in Milan in 1832) and not yet imbued with that national folk strain that would come to full flower in his opera Ruslan and Ludmila.
Although it has been dismissed as insignificant on those grounds, it is actually for all its similarity to mainstream European works of the time a skillful and attractive piece for an unusual combination of instruments that Glinka shows himself eminently capable of handling.
The heart of this four-movement work is the operatic slow third movement, with its generous solos for clarinet and bassoon, and a florid piano style popular at the time that we would probably characterize today as Chopinesque. The three musicians rose to the occasion, playing this long-breathed music in a smoothly passionate way that underlined its affinities with the bel canto tradition.
This was a fine performance of an overlooked piece, and the players gelled together nicely as a unit, no one performer ever dominating; rather, all three contributed to a thoroughly civilized conversation.
The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival’s winter programs are set for Sept. 18-20, Oct. 10-11 and 23, and Nov. 5 and 13-14. Venues include the Amarnick-Goldstein Concert Hall at Lynn University in Boca Raton, St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Lake Worth, and the Lighthouse ArtCenter in Tequesta. Call 800-330-6874 or visit www.pbcmf.org for more information.