By Robert Croan
South Florida Symphony Orchestra’s Summer with the Symphony, a once-a-month series of three chamber music concerts — each in Miami and then Fort Lauderdale — is an oasis in the off-season desert for classical music lovers.
It was therefore heartening to see that the concert I attended May 23 in Fort Lauderdale’s Center for Spiritual Living attracted a close-to-capacity crowd, and that the performers were awarded a prolonged standing ovation at the end.
The acclaim was well-deserved. The 90-minute program of piano trios played by violinist Huifang Chen, cellist Christopher Glansdrop (both first-deskers with the local orchestra) and pianist Tao Lin was engaging and revelatory. Particularly so this time, in that the group went off the beaten path with Café Music, a work by Detroit native Paul Schoenfield, which closed the evening with an unfamiliar and unexpected nod to the increasingly prevalent appropriation of jazz, swing, blues and Broadway into the world of classical composition.
Schoenfield, who died in Jerusalem last year at the age of 77, got the inspiration for this delightful piece after sitting in for the regular pianist in a smoke-filled Minneapolis cocktail lounge. When, in 1986, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra commissioned a new work from him for three of its players, Schoenfield immortalized that experience, in his words, as “a kind of high-class dinner music…which could be played at a restaurant but might also (just barely) find its way into a concert hall.” He accomplished his goal quite successfully, with numerous subsequent performances and a CD of this work winning a Grammy nomination in 2001.
The SFSO trio dug into Café Music with relish and a sense of fun that straightaway crossed the footlights. The strings have the catchy tunes in the opening Allegro movement, which Schoenfield manages to cast in a traditional sonata form, melding classical and pop elements in a seemingly natural way. The piano is not overlooked, however, providing a strong rhythmic underpinning, and the performers quickly settled into an already-established easy-going rapport. The second movement is a languorous intermezzo, Gershwinesque, with a mid-20th-century jazz tint that brings to mind Eddie Duchin or Carmen Cavallero. The finale is the most virtuosic of all, especially for the keyboard, where Lin really showed his chops, bringing the piece to its rousing, crowd-pleasing conclusion.
The earlier part of the concert was traditionally 19th century, but no less gratifying for that. Felix Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio No.1 in D Minor (Op. 49) is one of the most popular works for this instrumental combination, and the evening got off to a good start with Chen and Glansdrop projecting the first movement’s bel-canto style melodies with the air of two singers joining in a Liederabend or an operatic love duet. Both string players have honey-smooth tones, that they can exert to a coarser level when called for.
Mendelssohn’s writing, however, is typically in the lyrical style, and the approach here was restrained and Mozartean. The Andante movement gave the pianist opportunities to show that the keyboard, too, can sing, while the Scherzo had all three performers in the sort of whirlwind frenzy familiar from this composer’s Midsummer Night’s Dream score. By the time the impassioned finale came along, the musical adrenalin was flowing for an appropriately stimulating wrap-up.
In between these very different compositions, the ensemble played Franz Schubert’s exquisite Notturno in E-flat Major (Op. 148). It’s a mystery piece discovered decades after the composer’s death and thought to be a discarded movement from one of his piano trios — which will be the major work on ths month’s concert. Brief as it is, this isolated segment has a high gravitas that these players quite captured in their emotional interplay and sense for sharing alternating moments in the auditory spotlight.
The series will continue with a violin-piano Fantasy by Florence Price, plus piano trios by Debussy and Schubert on June 12 (Temple Israel of Greater Miami) and June 13 (Center for Spiritual Living); and with a Bach keyboard concerto and a Dvořák string quintet on July 24 (Coral Gables Museum) and July 25 (Center for Spiritual Living).
Details: southfloridasymphony.org or 954-522-8445.