The Dallas-area series Chamber Music International presented its second program of the season this Friday and Saturday evening. (This review is of the second concert, at St Barnabas Presbyterian Church in Richardson, Texas.) Pianist Joyce Yang began the evening with Béla Bartók’s suite Out of Doors, followed by the Three Madrigals for violin and viola by Bohuslav Martinů, played by Jun Iwasaki and Atar Arad. After intermission, violinist Felix Olschofka and cellist Ko Iwasaki (father of Jun, the violinist) joined the three other performers for Antonín Dvořák’s Piano Quintet no. 2 in A major.
The program was loosely organized around the “theme” of Central/Eastern Europe, with two Czech composers – Dvořák and Martinů – represented alongside the Hungarian Bartók. Thankfully, this unifying element was only intended as a general framework, rather than employed in an attempt to draw any meaningful comparison among the works. This, and the absence of written program notes, kept attention squarely on the music, especially fitting in the intimate setting of a church sanctuary.
The two pieces comprising the first half of the program could be seen to share a certain escapist quality. Bartók’s Out of Doors transports the audience beyond the walls of any concert hall and into more natural settings, which vary from bucolic to creepy to downright threatening. Martinů’s Three Madrigals, on the other hand, provided their ailing composer with an escape into music. Artistic director Philip Lewis touched on the circumstances of the latter’s composition in his introductory remarks: Martinů had suffered a fall one summer at the Tanglewood Festival and wrote the madrigals during his long recuperation. An accomplished violinist himself, the very act of writing for a string duo must have been therapeutic for Martinů. Whereas Bartók conjured a fantasy world by evoking the sounds of everything from bagpipes and percussion to a particular species of frog, Martinů instead wrote abstract works whose sheer levity and charm induce the same suspension of disbelief.
Introducing Out of Doors, Yang described the “controlled chaos” of the fast outer movements. She certainly pushed those – “With Drums and Pipes” and “The Chase”, respectively – to the limits of comprehensibility, but I found her whole performance in fact to be influenced by the idea of a controlled wildness, of nature cropped and twisted to fit, just barely, the medium of Western art music. Rather than exploiting touch and tone color to produce different atmospheres, Ms Yang created an emotionally charged world and placed the listener within; we weren’t being calmly serenaded with the sounds of crickets but were instead confronted with the schizophrenic panic of being alone deep in the forest at night. It was just as well she opted for this less subtle approach, as the instrument on hand this evening was in poor shape. More importantly, her interpretive choices resulted in a gutsy and effective performance.