Johannes Brahms had a healthy respect for the music of the past, and probably would have made a formidable professional musicologist had he chosen to go that route.
Even in his earlier works there is an engagement with older forms that would bear fruit throughout his compositional career, until his very last work, a series of 11 austerely beautiful organ chorale preludes based on centuries-old Lutheran church melodies.
That same respect for a consciously archaic style is evident in the first of his two Serenades for orchestra, written in 1857-60. The Serenade No. 1 (in D, Op. 11), originally conceived as an octet, then a nonet, before being orchestrated, has been resurrected as a wind-and-strings nonet by the English composer Alan Boustead, and it was that arrangement that closed the first concert this weekend in the four-concert 22nd season of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival.
In the Boustead “reconstruction,” the Serenade-as-nonet has a wide-open, rough-and-ready kind of sound that fits well with its old-fashioned divertimento-style format and rustic musical language. On Sunday afternoon at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach, the nine Festival players performed the work in a brisk, high-spirited manner, beginning with a very fast first movement tempo and a stellar introduction of the main theme by hornist Maria Serkin.
Tempos stayed on the rapid side throughout the work, and this was to its benefit. Instead of a knotty second movement Scherzo, it was one with shadow and mystery; the golden-edged Adagio also didn’t linger in an overlong manner, though its beautiful musical materials certainly invited it (here, too, Serkin was a standout).
Clarinetists Michael Forte and Richard Hancock played with laudable smoothness over Michael Ellert’s light-footed bassoon in the first of the fourth movement’s two minuets, and there was plenty of impressive virtuosic vigor from the strings in the fifth movement. The finale was more gentle than exuberant, which didn’t detract from the music’s charm but made it somewhat anticlimactic, well-played as it was.
And this was a thoroughly accomplished, entertaining version of the Serenade, and a good closer for the first concert. It would have benefited from the kind of detail that is hard to get to with limited rehearsal time on a piece of such length and difficulty; what it was missing in some parts was subtlety of phrasing, and an overall sense of direction and shape, a lack that cried out for a coach or conductor.
The concert opened with a fine reading of the Fantaisie for violin and harp (Op. 124), written in 1907 by Camille Saint-Saëns. In his later music, Saint-Saëns heads in a more forward-looking direction, though not anywhere near the places composers such as Stravinsky and Schoenberg were heading at the same time. But he finds, as in this Fantaisie, a good compromise with his conservative Romantic instincts and an interest in leaner textures, and it’s remarkable how frequently much of this music turns up on chamber music programs these days.
The soloists for the Saint-Saëns were violinist Mei Mei Luo and harpist Deborah Fleisher. Although the violin has the more pointedly melodic role in this work, it’s a piece for a partnership, and both women played it admirably. The lovely delicacy of Fleisher’s opening broken chords set a perfect atmosphere for the work, which explores an interesting, if not wide, emotional landscape. Luo’s initial attack on the triplet figure with which she starts was tentative, along with her intonation, but she found her musical sea legs quickly, and played the rest of the Fantaisie with power and beauty.
All of Saint-Saëns’ effects for the different sections of the piece came off expertly, and the ending, which has something of a surprise coda, was exquisite.
The other work on the first half of the program was the Trumpet Sonata (1995) of the Cleveland-born American composer Eric Ewazen, who has taught at Juilliard for more than 30 years. Ewazen’s style is highly melodic and resolutely tonal, and he is one of the leading composers of the American Romantic movement that made it acceptable for composers to eschew atonality if they wanted to.
This sonata, played by Marc Reese and pianist Lisa Leonard, who are husband and wife, is a good example of the kind of synthesis Ewazen has reached: The harmonies are 20th-century but with a vocabulary drawn more from jazz and pop procedures, which gives it a strong familiarity for contemporary audiences. He finds much still to do with traditional forms like sonatas, using big, memorable themes that he then puts through paces.
Reese is a very fine trumpet player, with plenty of lungpower and technique, and a strong communicative presence. The first movement, which gets underway after a short slow introduction with a motif-like theme over an ocean of rolling figures in the piano, stresses landscape and atmosphere rather than Carnival of Venice-style virtuosity.
Leonard handled her part surpassingly well, giving the movement a clear framework and structure. Reese has an attractive, engaging tone and he understands the mood of the piece thoroughly. His playing was a little ragged around the edges in the first movement; some of the secondary limbs of the main theme could have been smoother, and I think the straight mute at the end of the movement would have been more effective with a much more pinched sound than what we heard here.
The second movement, a tender, tuneful waltz with a moody middle section, effectively showcased Reese’s ability to produce warm, generous sound, and the jittery, chattering music of the finale suited his playing (and his tonguing skill) especially well. Leonard’s performance was muscular and accomplished, and she wisely kept her accompaniment in the background, which is not easy to do when playing next to an instrument with the sheer sonic force of a trumpet.
This was a smart piece of contemporary music programming, and it’s the kind of music that is likely to be around much longer than more experimental pieces of its time, and while not everyone can warm to this brand of tonal conservatism, surely Eric Ewazen has done no small thing in helping establish a language for a modern classical mainstream.
Week 2 of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival’s summer series is set for 7 p.m. Friday at Persson Hall at Palm Beach Atlantic University, 8 p.m. Saturday at the Eissey Campus Theatre in Palm Beach Gardens, and 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach. Beethoven’s Serenade (in D, Op. 25) for flute, violin and piano opens the program, followed by French composer Claude Arrieu’s Dixtuor for winds. The second half is devoted to the Piano Quintet (in F-sharp minor, Op. 67), of the American composer Amy Beach. Tickets are $25. Call 800-330-6874 or visit www.pbcmf.org.