By Robert Croan
South Florida Symphony closed its summer chamber music series with two Central European works from the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries — one forward-looking, the other solidly in the Beethoven-Brahms tradition. It was a pleasant and brief evening that sent home the capacity audience in Fort Lauderdale’s Center for Spiritual Development [on July 24] wishing for more.
The very idea of a “serenade” is actually a nod to the 18th century, when the term was used for a kind of dinner music in which the musicians literally marched out at the start and end of a meal in the home of a wealthy aristocrat. It was in fact old-fashioned by the time Beethoven composed a Serenade for string trio in the late 1790s. That work was an obvious model for the Serenade in C Major for string trio (Op.10) by Hungarian composer Ernö Dohnányi, composed in 1902, but the younger composer, retaining that instrumental combination and the successions of five or six short movements with a march at the beginning to be reprised at the end (and even a penultimate theme and variations), managed to put some very new wine into the old bottles.
The substance of Dohnányi’s youthful score is modern for its time, spiced with pungent dissonances, frequently shifting harmonies and other chromaticism which reminds us that the young Dohnányi (who lived until 1960 and taught for years at Florida State University) was to become the teacher of Bartók, as well as other successful 20th-century composers.
There’s considerable substance alongside the lightness of Dohnányi’s Serenade, and the excellent SFSO performers — violinist Huifang Chen, violist Brandon Wu and cellist Claudio Jaffé — approached this music with a sense of fun, which radiated into the audience. The group brought out the Prokofievian chordal pungency of the opening Marcia, with Wu making the most of his chance to shine with the appealing melody of the Romanza that followed. Humor and scholasticism existed side-by-side in the fugal Scherzo, while the Theme and Variations of the fourth movement emerged substantial and thought-provoking. The concluding Rondo was appropriately playful and cheery.
Dvořák’s Piano Quartet No. 2 (in E-flat major, Op. 87) was a work of the Czech composer’s maturity. It’s a serious, ambitious piece, looking back to the classical works of his elders, Beethoven and Brahms, striving for symphonic magnitude, yet strongly tinged with the rhythms and melodies of Dvořák’s native Bohemia.
The string players, joined by the sturdy and assertive pianist Catherine Lan, achieved a good balance between the sober and the frisky elements, which exist side-by-side in this piece. The opening Allegro was ear-catching and meaningful, with Chen’s authoritative violin taking the lead. Jaffé’s mellow cello sound dominated the focal Lento movement, the longest and most significant of all.
The third movement, a kind of musical joke interrupted by a lively folk dance, prepared the ear for the joyful, at times raucous finale in which all four performers combined their energies for the high-spirited conclusion.