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.
The mood lightened considerably as Mr Iwasaki and Mr Arad began their performance of the Three Madrigals. These two artists’ sounds are diametrically opposed, each exaggerating the tendency of his instrument. Iwasaki plays up the brightness of his violin’s clear sound, while Arad revels in the richness and warmth of the viola. It would be easy for two such performers to attempt to blend their sounds to a fault, thus losing distinctiveness, but they maintained their independent voices when it mattered most. The result was what sounded like one instrument with a remarkable range of timbre and pitch; the two instruments’ colors were made to match when in the same range, establishing unity while preserving the individual capabilities of both. This was exploited to brilliant effect in the playful competition of the many imitative passages.
This evening’s reading of the Dvořák Piano Quintet featured the same impetuous spirit and heterogeneity of timbres that had been hallmarks of the Bartók and Martinů, but in the case of the Dvořák I would have preferred a steadier pulse and more agreement regarding the quality of sound. This applied mainly to the relaxed, lyrical sections of the first movement, as well as some spots in the finale. The second movement, “Dumka”, struck a lovely balance between fluidity and repose, and the trio of the third-movement “Scherzo (Furiant)” offered a poignant commentary on the fiery outer sections of that movement. Ko Iwasaki provided some of the strongest artistry in the ensemble, which was not lacking in individual excellence.
For musicians who neither play in an established ensemble together nor are colleagues in residence, this was a strong performance. I should add that as a musician myself, it was heartening to see such a full, enthusiastic – and young! – audience present to appreciate these artists. And as for the power of music to transport those under its spell, a quality which has provided solace to Martinů and countless others: this concert took my mind for a precious few hours off of the impending, Handel-fueled onslaught of Messiahs and holiday pops extravaganzas. A success indeed.
