The second concert of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival’s 20th season underwent a programming change, but its tried-and-true finale, which didn’t change, worked its customary magic.
A large audience at the Crest Theatre on Sunday afternoon warmly applauded that last work, the Death and the Maiden Quartet (String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D. 810) of Franz Schubert. In one sense, the two pieces that came before it were warm-up acts, but to say that is to shortchange a deft swap-out on the musical menu.
Faced with having to jettison a wind septet by Eugène Bozza that had been planned, organizers of the festival could have gone for something twice-familiar or easy to put together. But to their credit, they chose a relatively new piece (2002) by a contemporary American composer. The Trio for Brass by Lauren Bernofsky, written for Del Mar College in Texas, is a clever, well-designed piece of writing for trumpet, horn and trombone, and with its Stravinsky-and-jazz harmonic flavorings it made a good case for Bernofsky’s belief that music should be enjoyable to listen to as well as play.
That’s not to say it was easy to perform. Trumpeter Brian Stanley, hornist Ellen Tomasiewicz, and trombonist Anthony McFarlane each had substantial solo lines in a piece that was more contrapuntal than not. The first movement, a martial, forthright piece, was especially tricky for Tomasiewicz, who had to play wide-ranging, snaky lines that topped out in the highest reaches of the instrument.
In the second, the horn set up a smooth ostinato pattern while Stanley played a melancholy modal tune that wandered over a lyrical landscape before ending with trumpet on top in a good old-fashioned Picardy third, and horn and trombone skittering away to support it with a widely spaced chord, evidence of how you can make big music with small forces.
The finale, more insistently march-like than the first, also had a bluesy feel throughout that caused Tomasiewicz some trouble when it came to a solo moment, but that overall gave the music a modern feel without being cheesy.
Again, a smart piece of programming, and it was followed by another, with a John McDonough arrangement for woodwind quintet of the best-known piece by the English composer Peter Warlock. The Capriol Suite, written in 1926, pays homage to Warlock’s love of Renaissance music, and in this version, unlike Warlock’s original for string orchestra, the archaism of the French sources comes through even more strongly; all that was missing were the drums.
The five players – flutist Beth Larsen, oboist Sherie Aguirre, bassoonist Michael Ellert, clarinetist Michael Forte and Tomasiewicz again on horn – performed this charming work with wit, aplomb and a high degree of delicacy.
The best performance of the suite’s six dances was the fourth, Bransles, in which the quintet played with an engaging sense of unity, bolstered by the muscle of Ellert’s race-to-the-bottom figures. The fifth movement (Pieds en l’air) was especially soft and gentle, and the sixth (Mattachins) had a full-on rusticity that made the suddenly daring harmonies at the very end even more surprising.
The second half of the program was devoted to the Schubert, and featured violinists Mei-Mei Luo and Dina Kostic, violist Rene Reder and cellist Susan Bergeron. This was a very fine performance of this repertoire staple, particularly in the second movement and the last pages of the finale. These four musicians are longtime friends and colleagues, and they clearly know each other’s styles thoroughly.
In general, this was a reading of the quartet that was conservative and clean; there was no room here for an outburst of ferocity at the beginning of the work or later on when the opening motif returned. Rather, what you had was a straightforward presentation of the first bars that made the next part of the music sound like a logical extension rather than an anticlimax. In other words, it paid due respect to Schubert’s Beethoven fixation by showing that the rest of the movement’s material truly was made out of those first 10 notes.
Ensemble was very solid throughout the entire piece, and the first movement had some especially fine playing with the smoothness of Luo and Kostic’s beguiling rendition of the secondary theme. But it was the second movement that impressed most, with a beautifully whispered opening (the song for which the quartet is named) that also avoided the tempting staginess of the drawn-out slowness to which some foursomes fall victim. This version kept the music moving, and the variations flowered naturally out of them.
Bergeron was particularly good in the solo of the second variation, playing with a lovely, burnished sound that her three partners carefully let float into the spotlight. Luo had the occasional difficulty in the very highest E-string theatrics here, but for the most part she handled her work expertly, and that’s always extra-tough in quartets of this period of composition, which treat the first violin much like a soloist.
If the Scherzo was attractive without being compelling, the tarantella finale had evidently been carefully rehearsed and polished, and it was thrilling to hear all four musicians spring along in this exciting music right in lock-step. Here, too, the triplet motif that began the quartet could be heard as the pulse of the last movement, tribute to the intelligent way in which these fine players met Schubert on his own terms and let him speak.
The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival offers its third concert of the summer at 8 p.m. Friday at Persson Hall on the campus of Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, at 8 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. The program features Martinu’s Serenata II for two violins and viola, Eric Ewazen’s Mosaics, for flute, bassoon and marimba, and the Clarinet Quintet (in A, K. 581) of Mozart. Tickets are $25, and a four-weekend ticket can be had for $85. Call 330-6874, visit www.pbcmf.org, or buy them at the door.