Bridge Ensemble Spans Wide Range Of Styles

The Bridge Ensemble Friday, April 21, The Met

The 2-year-old Bridge Ensemble linked three diverse musical styles in an outstanding concert at The Met Friday in the Spokane Chamber Music Association’s series of visiting ensembles.

Members of the Seattle-based Bridge Ensemble - violinist Mikhail Schmidt, violist Susan Gulkis, cellist David Tonkonogui and pianist Karen Sigers - pride themselves in bridging two musical cultures - Russia and the United States. Schmidt and Tonkonogui come from Russia, while Sigers and Gulkis were born and trained in this country. Despite diverse backgrounds, these four players achieved outstanding unity of concept in three deeply committed performances.

Gustav Mahler’s rarely performed Piano Quartet, which opened the program, is really only a torso, a lone surviving movement written when Mahler was 16. The Bridge Ensemble performance revealed it to be a winsome tribute to Schumann, a composer young Mahler especially loved. This score contains little of the anxiety and torment that infects Mahler’s mature works. The hints of uneasiness and breathless agitation you hear in Mahler’s Quartet prove to be echoes of Schumann’s violin sonatas and his own Piano Quartet.

The ensemble’s three string players provided an unforgettable performance of Alfred Schnittke’s String Trio, a work of chilling beauty commissioned in 1985 to commemorate the centennial of the birth of the Viennese composer Alban Berg. Schnittke’s Trio unfolds as a retrospective look at Viennese musical styles from Schubert to Mahler to Berg, himself, as seen through Schnittke’s late-20th-century lenses.

The trio includes references to Schubert’s dances and songs, to Mahler’s strange twists of folk tunes and military trumpet calls and to Berg’s harrowing harmonic clusters and exhausted sighs. The quiet sounds that dominate the trio’s two movements - one slow, the other slower - are interrupted by sudden outbursts of churning energy.

Unlike some composers who attempt to fashion works pirated from earlier composers and styles, Schnittke has created a powerful language of his own from his borrowings. And the Bridge players gave Schnittke’s Trio a sharply focused, highly dramatic performance of a memorable work.

After intermission, the tension of the Schnittke was relieved by Gabriel Faure’s Quartet in C minor, one of the most civilized pieces of chamber music ever written. The Bridge performance was delivered with a decidedly French lightness, far removed from the furrowed brows and churning intensity of the Schnittke Trio. This airy style seemed perfect fit for Faure, a 19th-century master poised between the dark passion of romanticism and the brilliant color of impressionism.

The Bridge Ensemble delivered both classic and modern repertoire with exceptional style and beauty, as well as a high gloss of technical finesse.