If the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival musicians went looking for a trove of unfamiliar but worthwhile music they could draw on year after year, they could do worse than the works of Georges (or George) Onslow.
Onslow (1784-1853), the French offspring of an English lord’s wayward younger son, was the only substantial French composer of chamber music in his day, writing no less than 35 string quartets, 34 string quintets, 10 piano trios, three piano quintets, two piano sextets and a piano septet, as well as sheaves of solo piano music and sonatas for violin and cello.
There is also a nonet (in A minor, Op. 77) for woodwind quintet, string trio and bass, and it was this work that was featured as the closing piece of the festival’s third program this past weekend. Although scholars say Onslow’s work is uneven, this nonet, composed in 1842, has a great deal of personality, and it was winningly and engagingly played by the festival musicians Sunday afternoon at Delray Beach’s Crest Theatre.
Onslow’s music (reams of which can be seen online at imslp.org) is akin to what would have happened had Beethoven stayed in the mode of his Op. 18 quartets and never changed his approach; it is expert writing in the Viennese Classical style, and delightful to listen to. The color and imagination that Onslow shows in the scoring of his nonet is one of its best features, and indeed it sounds like a scaled-down version of a symphony (he wrote four of those, too).
Its opening movement is vivid and dramatic, but within carefully laid-out parameters. While it has some aggressive solo outbursts for the violin and flute (nicely played by Mei Mei Luo and Karen Dixon, respectively), they are entirely within a harmonically conservative framework and not remotely over the top. But this is well-crafted music, and the nine musicians played it with gusto.
They sounded even more engaged in the second movement, with its Mendelssohn-style agitato flavoring and an expansive contrasting major-key section, though the tempo could have been a bit faster. The highlight of the work was the third movement, with a charming set of variations on a very Beethovenian main theme; some of Onslow’s wit could be heard in the first variation, with its alternating pizzicato strings and winds trading six-note patterns that outlined the harmonic motion.
The other variations offered the various instruments a chance for display, perhaps most notably in the fourth variation, with its elaborate solos for violin and viola, expertly dispatched by Luo and Rene Reder. Here, too, the tempos were on the slow side, but still effective. After its slow introduction, the finale got off to a good pace, and the final pages were vigorous and exciting.
The American composer James Stephenson, long a trumpet player for the Naples Philharmonic who has relocated to suburban Chicago, has written a good deal of music for his instrument, including a piece for trumpet, violin and piano called La Viaggo Vita, composed in 2010 to mark the 20th wedding anniversary of fellow trumpeter Richard Stoelzel and his wife Valerie.
Played here by another husband-and-wife team, trumpeter Marc Reese and pianist Lisa Leonard, along with violinist Dina Kostic, La Viaggo Vita proved to be a skillfully composed, highly attractive piece with a strong French flavor; with its occasional jazz excursions it was reminiscent of the music of Milhaud, but with much greater warmth and melodic directness.
The first of the work’s three movements, subtitled “Courtship,” is a fleet-footed, gently biting movement driven along by the piano’s constant motion, either with ostinati or repeated downward-scale walking bass. Trumpet and violin trade places with memorable melodic fragments and sometimes come together in awkward chords. But it is not disjunct music, just music that sounds from the beginning like commentary.
All three musicians gave a good account of their parts, with Reese demonstrating a generous sound and accurate technique. The slow movement (“Romance), framed again by a repeated figure in the piano part, this time a slow step-climbing figure, starts off with a sweet melody in violin and trumpet but soon grows more intense and passionate, which gives a good idea of how hard it is to contain emotion when you’re really crazy about someone.
It’s somewhat hard-edged music, and Reese and Kostic played their parts with force and clarity. The final movement (“Life”) restores the early 20th-century mood, with increased virtuosity and drive; the trumpet’s main theme is ideally suited for the instrument, marchlike and sassy. The trio had a good deal of tricky work to bring off, and did it well. It’s a very fine piece of contemporary composition, written in a style that draws good audiences today, and Reese, Kostic and Leonard represented Stephenson admirably well.
The concert opened with a more familiar piece, the Quartettsatz (in C minor, D. 703) of Franz Schubert, played by Kostic, Luo, Reder and cellist Susan Moyer Bergeron. Ensemble was less than ideal in the early going, and it seemed Sunday afternoon to knock the playing just slightly out of whack. The four women gave this taut masterwork a committed reading, but it also sounded a bit underrehearsed, which diminished the strength of the music’s argument.
A wind quintet by Paul Taffanel, founder of the modern school of French flute playing, and really, flute playing in general, filled out the program. It’s ably and meticulously composed, and while it’s often sweet and pretty, it also lacks urgency and passes by without making a big impression.
It was played by Dixon, oboist Erika Yamada, clarinetist Michael Forte, hornist Ellen Tomasiewicz and bassoonist Fernando Traba, all of whom were able to do some display in the first movement, thanks to Taffanel’s democratically minded construction.
Tomasiewicz opened the second movement (Andante) with a smoothly played solo, and the rest of the quintet did a good job of realizing the unusually busy nature of this particular slow movement. The finale, a sprightly tarantella-style excursion, is immediately appealing, and got a thoroughly engaged performance that ended the first half of the concert with warmth and grace.
The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival performs its last week of concerts tonight, Saturday and Sunday, opening with Manuel de Falla’s Seven Popular Spanish Songs, the Quintet No. 2 for flute, string trio and harp by Jean Francaix, and the Trio Pathétique for clarinet, bassoon and piano of Mikhail Glinka. The program will end with the String Quartet No. 3 (in D, Op. 44, No. 1) of Felix Mendelssohn. Concerts are at 7:30 p.m. today at Palm Beach Atlantic University’s Persson Hall, 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Eissey Campus Theatre in Palm Beach Gardens, and at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach. Tickets are $25; call 800-330-6874 or visit www.pbcmf.org for more information.