ChamberFest Cleveland is packing halls in its 13th season with its usual sterling line-up of performers and expanded programming that includes a hefty dose of contemporary music. Of the 26 composers featured on the programs, ten are living, and four are attending and/or playing in the festival. On a night devoted to “Variations on Love and Loss”, the centerpiece was a meditation on suicide by American composer Judith Markovich. The loss was personal for the festival organizers, adding emotional impact to a dirge buttressed by bright inventions and a mainstay of the chamber music repertoire.
Pianists Roman Rabinovich and James (Zijian) Wei teamed up to open the evening with a tasty aperitif, Lutosławski’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini for Two Pianos. With Rabinovich providing a solid bottom and Wei dancing on top through high-spirited riffs and runs, their pinpoint performance offered easy accessibility to a complex work brimming with clever turns of phrase. If it’s possible to perform a piece with playful intensity, this was a persuasive and engaging exemplar.
The program took a sudden turn with Bright Sheng’s Four Movements for Piano Trio, a 1990 work originally written for the Peabody Trio. After a delicate opening of graceful notes and phrases, it blossoms into a burst of matching string lines that peak and then drop to a minimalist level for a quiet finish. The mood shifted from subdued to frantic and back again, with arresting sounds throughout – unusual harmonics with an Asian flavor, precision pizzicato from the violin, cello and piano strings. Violinist Kristin Lee and cellist Raman Ramakrishnan turned in tight, focused performances, and Wei showed his versatility on both sides of the keyboard.
Following the premiere of Markovich’s piece, the evening concluded with a classic, Schubert’s String Quintet in C major. Ramakrishnan and fellow cellist Oliver Herbert were joined by violinists David McCarroll and Diana Cohen and violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt for what was a surprisingly lackluster treatment. The tempo was slow and the approach understated, so much so that the performance sounded listless at times. There was some refined individual playing throughout, in particular by Ramakrishnan and Pajaro-van de Stadt, and the final two movements finally came to life with some sharp, energetic execution. But mostly the music sounded like it was headed in the right direction without ever getting where it was trying to go.
Emotion was the key to Markovich’s “Oh, my son...”, a lament for a young man’s suicide using text written by his father, David Stern, who is a close friend of festival co-organizer Franklin Cohen. So the entire Cohen musical family took the stage for this performance – Franklin on clarinet, son Alexander on percussion, daughter Diana playing violin and her husband Rabinovich playing piano. Tenor Dominic Armstrong added a powerful voice in a hybrid role, a combination of narration and singing punctuated by anguished phrases like “How could we know?” He acted the part to great effect, supported by brilliant musicianship. The music came in short interludes that framed and accented the text, some of it somber, some plaintive, all sadly tender with dark undertones from four timpani. Overall, the Cohens turned in a heartfelt and touching performance of a score that often seemed as pained and bewildered as its subject.
At nearly 40 minutes, it was also overly long. But mourning has its own protracted pace, especially when unanswered questions haunt the survivors. That particular type of anguish Markovich’s piece captured very well.
