The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival entered its third decade Friday night in West Palm Beach in the arms of a warm, supportive audience that gave all of its work lengthy applause, and laughed forcefully at the jokes its performers offered in oral program notes before each piece.
A good time at Palm Beach Atlantic University’s Persson Hall was certainly had by all, but perhaps a little too much of a good time. This was the first presentation in public with this particular program (it was repeated Saturday night in Palm Beach Gardens and will be repeated this afternoon in Delray Beach), so there was some expected opening-night roughness here and there. But there was also an unfinished quality to some of the playing that detracted somewhat from the music.
A fair case in point came with the Trio for oboe, bassoon and piano of Francis Poulenc, a masterwork full of this composer’s endearing mix of music-hall charm and beautiful melody. The three musicians – oboist Sherie Aguirre, bassoonist Michael Ellert and pianist Lisa Leonard – are excellent, veteran players who know this music well (Leonard told the good-sized audience that Ellert had played it 72 times before Friday night) and are thoroughly conversant with anything Poulenc can throw at them.
But this Trio was played with unyielding force and power, to the detriment of its nuance. Leonard played the opening bars with impressive strength, but that seemed to set the bar for this reading at an aggressive high point where it remained stuck.
The second movement (Andante) is one of Poulenc’s loveliest, with a memorable tradeoff in the middle between bassoon and oboe of a turn-like figure and a falling fifth that speaks eloquently of Poulenc’s gift for song, but instead of being the flowering of the music that led up to it, it was driven home in the same all forte, all the time manner as the rest of the movement.
The two outer movements also had the same sense of hammering it down, even when the music was its most light-footed. The playing was technically unimpeachable throughout, but this is an interpretation that needs some variety, some light and shade, to make its best effect.
Some of the same over-caffeinated feel was evident during the opening work, one of the many string quintets of Luigi Boccherini (in F, Op. 39, No. 2, or G. 338). Overall, this was an effective performance of a charming piece, and the players made sure to bring out its feeling of geniality and good spirits.
Intonation, particularly from first violinist Mei Mei Luo, was imprecise in the first movement, and in the last two movements, some of the musical sections didn’t have a complete coating of interpretive polish; phrases needed to be finished off just-so, so that the structure of the piece would be more apparent.
That said, there were some very good moments, such as the way violinist Dina Kostic and violist Rene Reder set up the tune of the second movement with delicate pizzicato, and the very ending of the quintet, which wrapped with a smile-worthy feeling of wit.
Before the opening of the second movement proper, Leonard and Reder were joined by amateur clarinetist David Hinds for the finale of the Kegelstatt Trio (in E-flat, K. 498) of Mozart. This was billed as a preliminary event in a possible pro-am program for chamber music in which players such as Hinds could join the professionals for coaching and performance. It was generous of all concerned to try out this idea, and while Hinds clearly suffered some jitters, it ended up being a reasonably competent reading that the audience enjoyed.
The formal second half of the program opened with Benny’s Gig, an eight-part piece for clarinet and double bass written for Benny Goodman by Morton Gould for Goodman’s 1962 tour of what was then called the Soviet Union. Clarinetist Michael Forte and bassist Jason Lindsay gave a strong reading of this work, which is primarily jazz, though its sixth movement, a tricky calypso number, reminds you what was popular on the radio in the days just before the British Invasion.
The piece alternates between bluesy slow tunes and up-tempo swing, with Lindsay mostly playing pizzicato, though in the fourth movement (marked Brisk), the bow came out for a rhythmic dialogue between bass and clarinet that was the most interesting movement of the piece. Lindsay played beautifully, and while Forte had a big, pleasing tone for most of the music, his playing could have used a stronger innate sense of swing; the music would have benefited from some more looseness on his part.
The concert ended with a true rarity, the Septet for trumpet, wind quartet, viola and cello by the Franco-Polish composer Alexandre Tansman. This composer’s usual harmonic density was on display throughout this fascinating piece, which was very French in flavor but with a much more relentless rhythmic drive, as if Darius Milhaud had met the Sergei Prokofiev of the Scythian Suite.
The outer two movements of the three-movement work had different rhythmic cells but the same general motion, both building from a clarinet-and-bassoon perpetual motion into a whirling machine. Tansman created an interesting sound world with the Septet, and the festival in programming it has uncovered another piece of worthy overlooked music.
It was well-rehearsed, too: In the final bars of the finale the instruments begin a gradual crescendo to the end, and with the beginning of that phrase the players provided the first truly soft dynamic of the night.
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The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival’s Week I program continues this afternoon at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach. The concert begins at 2 p.m. Next week’s programs are set for July 13 and 15, and include music by Schubert, Mel Powell, Nino Rota and Mozart. Tickets are $25 per concert, and are available at the door or in advance; a subscription rate for the remaining three weekends also is available. To order, call 800-330-6874, or send an email to info@pbcmf.org.