Filmless scores: Chamber Music International in Dallas

Chamber Music International kicked off its 27th concert season on Saturday evening at Southern Methodist University. The centerpiece of the program was John Williams’ Quartet La Jolla, and the other works all used various combinations of these instruments. Violinist Cho-Liang Lin (who played on all but one of the pieces) was joined by harpist Deborah Hoffman, cellist Joshua Roman and clarinetist John Bruce Yeh.

The series presents concerts at several venues – St Barnabas Presbyterian Church and SMU’s Caruth Auditorium, plus additional performances this year at City Performance Hall – with thoughtful, unpretentious programming. As was the case tonight, instrumentation tends not to be repeated in works throughout a given evening; a cast of guest artists is on hand for whichever piece requires the greatest number of performers, and a program of works for smaller ensembles is crafted based on the instruments available. For all the effort frequently devoted to affected, cumbersome programming concepts, the convenience-base approach at CMI seems to succeed on good taste alone.

Although it was admittedly coincidental (the musicians noticed it during rehearsals), this concert interestingly included works by four composers tied to film music. Besides the quartet by Williams, there was music by Paul Reade, Ingolf Dahl and Jacques Ibert. Reade died in 1997, and composed the suite heard this evening as incidental music for the BBC series The Victorian Kitchen Garden; his other credits include the theme music to Antiques Roadshow. Dahl immigrated to the United States during the Second World War and settled in Los Angeles, where he played piano on many Hollywood soundtrack recordings and was heavily involved in the show-business community. And Ibert, after working as a pianist in silent movie houses as a young man, composed several film scores later in life.

The program was bookended by two of the film composers, Reade and Williams, although their works heard tonight could not have been more different. Victorian Kitchen Garden suite served as a charming opener. Scored for clarinet and harp, the suite has a quaint and endearing tone, a sort of musical equivalent to rhyming couplets. Dahl’s Concerto a Tre was composed in 1947 for clarinet, violin, and cello. This was playful and fairly conventionally tonal, and demanded equal virtuosity of all three players, especially as the music spins nearly out of control to its conclusion. The Ibert Trio for violin, cello and harp featured the latter as its central instrument (Ibert’s daughter was an accomplished harpist) and had far more sophistication in expression than the preceding two works.

After intermission came the two oldest pieces on the program – the Handel Passacaglia from his Harpsichord Suite in G major, arranged for violin and cello by the Norwegian violinist Johan Halvorsen, and Saint-Saëns’s Fantaisie in A major – as well as the newest one.

The Quartet La Jolla for violin, clarinet, cello and harp was premiered in the summer of 2011 by the same four musicians who gave the work only its second performance tonight. Williams wrote it for Mr Lin, who directs the La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest, and the combination of is probably unique in the chamber repertoire. Its five movements consist of an agitated Introduction, Scherzo, and Finale (first, third, and fifth, respectively) interspersed with lyrical episodes (Aubade and Cantando). While maintaining a style all his own, Williams sounds influenced at times by Bartók and Prokofiev – the violin line at the beginning of the finale echoes the second movement of the latter’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major. And as significant a role as the harp plays, the emotional center of this work is its bluesy fourth movement, built around a clarinet solo line over pizzicati in the cello part.

The sense of ensemble, no matter who was playing together, could not have been tighter this evening, which is extraordinary for four people who live and work thousands of miles apart. Ms Hoffman, who is principal harpist of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in New York, commanded the wide range of dynamics and colors required of this music, dispelling notions casual listeners may have of the harp as a glissando-and-special-effects-only instrument. Mr Yeh, a clarinetist in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, blended his sound well with that of the string instruments and dazzled in several solo moments. Cellist Joshua Roman was flawless all evening, his lustrous sound and phenomenally efficient bow technique especially on display in the Handel. Cho-Liang Lin was a bit rougher around the edges than I’m used to hearing him, but the energetic commitment to ensemble work was still there, and so was a formidable musical intellect.

With so many staggeringly accurate and reprehensibly boring performances as there are in today’s classical music world, there truly are more important things than a few missed notes.