Such a one was Rosalie Wertheim, a Dutchwoman whose gender worked against her as a composer and whose faith, Judaism, made her a target. But as the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival showed this past weekend, she was able to create interesting music even while she hid from the Gestapo in Amsterdam.
Wertheim’s woodwind trio (written in 1942, the year she went into hiding), played by the three founders of the festival — flutist Karen Dixon, clarinetist Michael Forte and bassoonist Michael Ellert — is a modest four-movement work that breathes an air of cool rationality and emotional reserve. Wertheim (1888-1949) studied in Paris and her music has a witty French neoclassical flavor, and like her French colleagues she had a fine sense of the potentialities of each instrument.
The themes are very clearly set out in this trio; in the first movement, a bluesy clarinet scale comes to play a more prominent part in the texture, and in the Adagio second movement, the clarinet’s melancholy opening theme, played over a steady pulse in the bassoon, unifies the writing as it returns again and again.
On Sunday at Delray Beach’s Crest Theatre, the three musicians played this work with precision and elegance, and some virtuoso flash in the latter two movements, which have a hint of highly sublimated jazz. It’s a charming piece, and the festival founders performed an act of selfless musical service in programming it.
Three string voices were up next, in an early Beethoven masterwork, his String Trio No. 3 (in G, Op. 9, No. 1). Violinist Mei Mei Luo, violist Rene Reder and cellist Susan Moyer Bergeron were the very able players. This was a good example of one of the interesting side effects of these festival concerts: Composers of true canonical stature such as Beethoven really stand out amid the rest of the music, and the players give it their all.
This performance had a strong Classical bent that was most welcome. The second movement, for instance, is a beautiful, passionate, intense outpouring in which a simple rising three-note motif takes on real eloquence in the closing bars. But that doesn’t mean it should sound like Chopin, and here, Luo (who seems most comfortable in late Romantic repertoire) and her colleagues kept this proto-Romantic effusion well within the early Beethoven aesthetic.
Some more contrast in the trio section of the Scherzo would have been welcome, but in the finale, the three women did a fine job of bringing out the drama and tension of the second theme, which helped bring across the rest of the movement’s abundance of ideas and drive the trio to a powerful conclusion.
The final work, which took up the entire second half, was the Nonet (for wind quintet, string trio and bass) of the Italian composer Nino Rota, best-known for his film scores for Fellini and Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather). But Rota also composed prolifically for the concert stage, and many of his symphonic and chamber pieces have been recorded.
The five-moment Nonet, which the festival has programmed before, has Rota’s easy melodicism and film-score directness but little of the pop cheesiness that dates some of his cinema work. The first movement has a strong neoclassical feel mixed with salon touches, and the second, an Andante, draws a lot of tenderness and a troubled emotional landscape out of a winding theme announced by the oboe.
Hornist Maria Serkin was especially fine in the third movement , tossing off the bubbly, tricky main theme expertly and then following it up with lovely playing of the mournful melodic lines of the minor-key contrasting section. The five extravagant variations of the fourth movement’s Brahmsian main theme gave the nine musicians a chance to explore a wide variety of moods and colors, and they did so admirably.
The cartoony music of the last movement, which the players gave a suitably zippy tempo, ended the concert in high spirits, being well-played and full of the humor with which Rota imbued this piece.
The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival continues tonight and Sunday afternoon with Program 4, and includes a wind quintet by Ottorino Respighi, a string quartet by Donizetti, and a chamber symphony by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari. Performances are at 7:30 tonight at the Eissey Campus Theatre in Palm Beach Gardens and 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach. Call 561-547-1070 or visit pbcmf.org for more information.
Editor’s note: The posting of this review was delayed by technical factors.