Opening night concerts can be an invitation to default to lightweight programming, letting extramusical distractions become the focus. Not so at Seattle Chamber Music Society. The 2023 Summer Festival kicked off with a concert that kept the audience’s attention avidly fixed on the music at hand. This was the first of a total of twelve chamber concerts that will extend throughout the month of July, along with additional free concerts in the region’s parks and related events.
The Summer Festival attracts musicians from far and wide, making Seattle a major destination for chamber music aficionados. A result of the large roster of participants is that different chamber music formations can be juxtaposed on a single program. This opening concert offered a rewarding and nourishing consideration of the variety of instrumental combinations to which an ensemble of three players is amenable.
Ernő Dohnányi’s Serenade in C major from 1902 is the music not only of a young composer but of one who is just coming into his authentic voice following a precocious apprenticeship. The merits of this string trio in five movements were fully savored in this sympathetic account. Arnaud Sussmann’s viola gave the Romanza’s theme a satiny shimmer. Violinist Erin Keefe, cellist Mark Kosower and Sussmann played off each other to exciting effect in the spiritedly fugal Scherzo at the center of the work and the finale, showing remarkable ensemble precision.
Another subtlety of Artistic Director James Ehnes’ thoughtful program was the implicit connection to Brahms, whose chamber music will be explored in depth throughout the festival. Formerly touted contemporaries who have since been forgotten and later composers who were shaped in various ways by Brahms’ influence are part of that endeavor. The Serenade combines Brahmsian intricacy of craft with Hungarian folk flavors to convey an engagingly fresh voice in the still-hopeful early years of the new century.
Contrasts is Belá Bartók’s only chamber work with a wind instrument, originating as a commission for Benny Goodman in 1938. The celebrity clarinetist and King of Swing likely did not foresee just what an unusual piece would result. Bartók in turn played with the surprising discoveries that came from combining the distinctive sonorities of clarinet, violin and piano and highlighted the differences instead of smoothing them over – one of several “contrasts” running through this score.
Clarinetist Jean Johnson played with fierce virtuosity and depth of expression but seemed to hold back on the piece’s moments of klezmer frenzy and, in the last movement, outrageously unbuttoned, even savage, humor. The sonic balance with violinist Benjamin Beilman and Alessio Bax at the keyboard was inconsistent, but all three were at their best in evoking the phantasmal night music textures of the middle movement.
The evening’s highlight came after intermission with a spectacularly engaging interpretation of Maurice Ravel’s Piano Trio in A minor from 1914. Ehnes was joined by Steven Osborne on piano and cellist Alisa Weilerstein, a frequent collaborator but here making her belated Seattle Chamber Festival debut. The three musicians played with extraordinary unanimity of purpose. Ehnes and Weilerstein managed to create the illusion of a single instrument, his violin wrapped by the warmth of her cello, and together emphasized Ravel’s lyricism with sumptuous but authentic passion. The bell-like solemnity from Osborne’s Steinway laid the groundwork for a Passacaille that reached breathtaking extremes of emotion.
But this account of the Trio also encompassed agile, featherlight textures and intense physicality, keenly alert to Ravel’s metrical ingenuity. Harmony of the highest order – not just of sonorities, but of an ensemble of first-rate musical thinkers finding a common will – thrilled the packed house.
