Although technically it takes place in the very last days of spring, the Mainly Mozart Festival shares with the best summer festivals the idea that a sweltering month is just as good as a frigid one for pursuing music of the utmost seriousness and high caliber.
This past Sunday, at the Danielson Gallery on the grounds of the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, the veteran Miami foursome known as the Amernet Quartet offered a program of excellence and high emotion in the compositional persons of Mozart, Dvořák and Webern in their Mainly Mozart appearance. Indeed, their Mozart was a relative rarity — three of its members performed the epic Divertimento (in E-flat, K. 563) to bring the afternoon to an impressive conclusion.
But first, the quartet — violinists Misha Vitenson and Marcia Littley, violist Michael Klotz and cellist Jason Calloway — opened Sunday’s concert with early Webern, his Langsamer Satz (slow movement) for string quartet. Like his other early work, the orchestral piece Im Sommerwind, this music has become far more popular than his mature composed in precise 12-note style.
The Langsamer Satz, an 8-minute work composed in 1905, is very much in the hyper-Romantic vein of his mentor Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, but even if the language is not particularly new or distinctive, it has a pronounced discipline and shape. The music travels in a logical direction from its high-floating main theme to its central climax and back again, and its emotional intensity is easy for audiences to grasp.
A performance by the Amernet Quartet is always distinctive for its passion and commitment; Vitenson and Klotz in particular are players of the big gesture, and they were prominently on display here. Littley, too, had her moment in the sun with a lovely reading of her solo line, one that was seamlessly in keeping with her group’s overall interpretation. Although this isn’t the kind of music we honor Webern for, concertgoers love it, and the Amernet played it with warmth and much beauty.
Of the 14 quartets of Antonín Dvorak, only the last three are played all the time (and No. 12 is one of best-known works), and it takes some doing to look into his earlier work in this form. The earliest quartets tend to be very prolix and the material not at the highest level of inspiration, but his Quartet No. 9 (in D minor, B. 75), composed in 1877, deserves to be much better-known.
The Amernet played the Ninth Quartet many times this past season, and it was clear from Sunday’s concert that they have it fully in their fingers. The opening movement, which is built around one of those gently melancholic modal tunes so typical of this composer, had a recognizable pulse to its three-quarter time format; instead of letting the sheer prettiness of the music wander and wash over its auditors, the quartet never lost sight of the music’s strong rhythmic profile.
If the first movement was imbued with a subtle spirit of the dance, the quartet was forceful and direct about the bodies-in-motion origins of the polka second movement. There was an infectious sense of high spirits here, and the sudden dynamic shifts and sly pizzicato chords at the end of the trio were deftly rendered. Vitenson played commandingly in the beautiful third movement, which hearkens back to older styles of quartet writing in giving the most prominence to the first violin; his long, high solo work in the heart of the movement was elegantly accompanied by the other three players, who did a fine job of making all those thirty-second notes murmur and shimmer as effortlessly as possible.
The finale was vigorous and powerful, and it showed off the technical accomplishment of the four players, who reeled off its ribbons of rapid notes with fire and sweep. In all of this, the Amernet showed itself to be an exemplary player of Dvořák, with strong sympathy for his melodic power, his many dance-like forms, and his emotional directness.
After the intermission, Vitenson, Klotz and Calloway returned for the Mozart trio (Littley was in the audience, which was a large one for the intimate confines of the Danielson Gallery). This six-movement work was composed about a month after the Jupiter Symphony, and it has all the groundbreaking inventive power of that symphony and its two orchestral companions from Mozart’s remarkable summer of 1788.
From Calloway’s opening remarks to the end of the trio, there was a sense of special occasion about this performance. This piece is rarely done, not just because of its less-than-popular instrumentation, but for its 40-minute length and demands on players’ stamina. And indeed, the three Amernet players showed some small signs of fatigue here and there, though they didn’t mar the presentation.
The first movement alone is symphonic in breadth and ambition, and the three men played it masterfully, with an exemplary understanding of its thematic variety and how it all fits into the wider context, which is no easy feat in Mozart. The slow movement had an admirable feeling of serenity, but perhaps the three-note upbeat that runs through the Adagio was somewhat overstressed, and the tempo itself a little on the slow side, though it’s a very difficult thing to find the right speed that will allow the operatic roulades that decorate this movement to float naturally rather than sound rushed.
The third movement’s minuet was played matter-of-factly and made a nice contrast with the elegant heat of the second movement, followed by one of the supreme tests of this work, the theme-and-variations fourth movement. The trio carried it off expertly, reaching real heights of profundity in that astonishing B-flat minor counterpoint variation, which suddenly shoves the music back a century into the severity of the late Baroque, to brilliant effect.
At this point, some of the strain of the first four movements could be heard in the fifth, a minuet with two trios that needs an almost exaggerated approach to bring off successfully because of its plain material. The three men sounded dutiful and noncommittal here; the music would have benefited by a heightened sense of contrast. The joyful finale started somewhat roughly, but its catchy, sunny-day tune, ideal for whistling, soon began to soar, especially after the martial call that leads to an all out athletic workout for the musicians.
Vitenson, Klotz and Calloway dug into these passages with abandon and sparkling technique, and by the closing bars, brought the music to a sense of triumph, so much so that the audience was on its feet for some time, giving the trio a long series of curtain calls. It was a magnificent reading of this great piece, and demonstrated that there are plenty of hot-month concertgoers who are willing to follow musicians into the most challenging corners of the repertoire.
The Mainly Mozart Festival continues at 4 p.m. today at the Biltmore’s Granada Ballroom with a concert of chamber works featuring violinist Eli Matthews, guitarist Federico Bonacossa, and festival director and pianist Marina Radiushina. Tickets are $20; call 786-556-1715 or visit www.mainlymozart.com.