At its most important, the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival is about discovery, in hearing something worthwhile that its musicians have brought out of the libraries or fresh off the stocks for its loyal audience of nearly two decades.
In the first installment Friday of its third week of concerts, the musicians returned in a largely French program to the work of Jacques Ibert, whose Deux Mouvements of 1922 the group performed and recorded 10 years ago. That work, for two flutes, clarinet and bassoon, got an encore performance Friday night at Palm Beach Atlantic University’s Persson Hall, but it was another composition by Ibert that really raised the temperature in the room.
The Trio for violin, cello and harp, written by Ibert in the dark year of 1944 for his harpist daughter, is an exemplary piece in whose second movement the ghost of Gabriel Fauré looms large, but which overall is a quintessentially French, marvelously colorful exploration of the timbres and capabilities of its three instruments. Harpist Kay Kemper was joined by violinist Mei-Mei Luo and cellist Christopher Glansdorp for this three-movement piece, which differs from the earlier Ibert work and much other of its ilk in its red-bloodedness, fire and drive.
The opening movement, marked Allegro tranquillo, was anything but laid-back in this performance; the first chordal snap in the harp was followed by a fierce athleticism from Luo and Glansdorp for the sinuous opening theme, giving the movement a headlong feel that the three players were happy to feed with plenty of fuel. Kemper provided strong rhythmic backing for her string partners, and offered impressive power in the fountains of glissandi that burst out in the middle of the movement.
Glansdorp demonstrated beautiful tone quality in the lovely second movement, a Fauré-style chanson from its harp ostinato to its melancholy harmonies and long-limbed melody, and Luo answered him in the same open-hearted fashion. The brusque energy of the opening was evident again in the closing Scherzando con moto, in which a chattering five-note motif was prominent and was effectively contrasted with a gentler secondary theme in the harp. The three musicians worked admirably well together, and their high-octane reading of this fine Trio made it stand out.
The Ibert Deux Mouvements that followed featured the same musicians that assembled for it a decade ago: flutists Karen Dixon and Beth Larsen, clarinetist Michael Forte and bassoonist Michael Ellert. This is a slighter piece than the Trio, and gains its attractiveness in its sly humor, exemplified by the two smirking-bassoon codas. This was an expert performance, distinguished by the fat, rich flute tone of Dixon and Larsen and its ensemble control, such as the skillful group diminuendo in the first of the movements.
Larsen and Dixon opened the second half with an old-fashioned Romantic-era display piece, a fantasy on themes from Verdi’s opera Rigoletto by the flutist-composer team of brothers Karl and Franz Doppler. It was designed to show off flute virtuosos, and in Larsen and Dixon it had two excellent players who gave us a good idea of why this kind of piece was so popular in its day.
Although this piece featured, briefly, La donna è mobile and Bella figlia dell’amore, much of it was built on the Act I aria for Gilda, Caro nome. The Dopplers surrounded these tunes with plenty of rapid chromatic scales in duet, or let one flute play difficult accompaniment figures while the other sang sweetly above it. There was no hint of any squeaks, honks or flubs in any of this, just two veteran players spinning out yards of silky smooth scales and dazzling filigree. Pianist Michael Yannette accompanied skillfully, and stayed well in the background.
Yannette, Forte and Ellert opened the concert with the other German work on the program, Mendelssohn’s early Concertpiece No. 2 for clarinet, bassoon and piano, written in 1832 but with the misleadingly high posthumous opus number of 114. The bassoon part of this work was originally composed for the now obsolete basset horn, and Forte hinted in remarks before the piece that real basset horns might show up on the festival’s concerts in its upcoming 20th anniversary season.
This is a modest but very attractive work, a chamber concerto for the two wind instruments that’s light on its feet. Both Ellert and Forte played with charm and suavity, with Ellert tackling a slightly more difficult part in that the second of the three movements required him to play the wide-ranging arpeggios supporting the clarinet tune, an Italian opera aria in everything but name. Both musicians were nicely in synch for the bubbling third movement, and they had good support from Yannette.
Like the second concert in the festival, the third ended with a major work from the string quartet repertoire, this time the String Quartet in F of Maurice Ravel. This sublime masterpiece contains not just wonderful music but also an object lesson in Ravel’s genius at orchestration; few composers before or since have been able to draw so much color and sound from only four instruments.
Violinists Dina Kostic and Rebecca Didderich (more familiar as a violist), violist Rene Reder and cellist Susan Bergeron joined forces for the Ravel, and did a more than respectable job. They were at their best in the most straightforward parts of the quartet, such as the tricky five-beat fourth movement, which sounded carefully and thoroughly rehearsed, and in the second movement, with its frequent time shifts and pizzicato punctuation.
And while this was a good presentation of the quartet in that it allowed listeners to appreciate the warmth of Ravel’s melodic writing and the richness of his sonic fabric, something subtle about the music seemed to elude this foursome. The closing bars of the third movement, for example, were deliberate where they might have been mysterious and dramatic, and the delicate, frequent harmonic changes in the first movement could have been played with a greater sense of surprise and mood.
What’s needed here is a little more of what makes Ravel, well, Ravel: An illusion of spontaneity and naked emotion carried out by means of an almost fearful precision.
The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival repeats this program at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest Theatre, Delray Beach, and at 8 p.m. Monday at the Eissey Campus Theatre at Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens. Tickets are $22. Call 800-330-6874 or visit www.pbcmf.org.