Institute Pieces Daring, Exciting
Performances at the Schweitzer Institute have an adventurous edge. Where else are you likely to hear a piece prepared with the care that players usually accord only to Mozart, and a Mozart work that sounds like the ink is still wet on the page.
This week I heard two Schweitzer Institute chamber music programs where lively classics by Schubert, Mozart and Beethoven shared programs with music by Donald Erb, Terry Vosbein and Jeffrey Nytch - composers very much alive and present at the performances.
Along with exciting performances of works by Roussel and Hindemith, last Sunday’s program, included Vosbein’s recently completed, single-movement Trio. The work had an edge of excitement provided by pianist Shannon Wettstein, violinist Eva Burmeister and cellist James Jacobson.
Vosbein is a young composer with a keen sense of the colorful sounds the three instruments can make and an impressive ability to shape his ideas coherently.
The program ended with a most impressive reading of Franz Schubert’s Quintet for string quartet and “extra” cello.
In my view this is one of the greatest chamber pieces ever written. (Certainly, at nearly an hour long, it’s one of the longest!) Violinists Adriana Hulscher and Ellen Thomae, violist Ann Gregg and cellists James Jacobson and Oreet Ranon met the work’s challenges of beauty and endurance as Schubert unfolded one stunning melody and harmonic twist after another.
Only in the folksy high spirits of the dances which dominate the scherzo and finale did these players seem a touch too serious.
On Tuesday, the Schweitzer players came off the mountain to the Marie Antoinette Room of the Davenport Hotel in Spokane, brought here by the Spokane Chamber Music Association. This was the first time, and I hope not the last, that Schweitzer chamber music has been heard here in Spokane.
The concert opened with Mozart’s Trio for Piano and Winds performed by pianist Mari Kimura, oboist Nancy Dimmock, clarinetist Joselito Tanega, bassoonist Laura Shillito and hornist Eric Powell.
The unforced lyricism of their stylish playing demonstrated the work’s operatic roots.
Along with Alex Wilder’s earfriendly Suite for horn, tuba and piano and Donald Erb’s not-so-earfriendly but gutsy “Sonneries,” Tuesday’s modern works included Jeffrey Nytch’s “Lyric Reflections of Carl Sandburg.”
Nytch based this appealing viola and piano work on seven Sandburg poems dealing with childhood and nature. Played by violist Kenji Bunch and pianist Shannon Wettstein, the lyricism of the viola part suggested poet’s own lilting voice and its spare piano writing perfectly evoked Sandburg’s moodiness.
The program concluded with a classically elegant performance of Beethoven’s Quartet No. 2. But the performers - violinists Tina Cho and Heather Crawford, viola Ann Gregg and cellist Oreet Ranon - also allowed Beethoven’s mischievous humor of “real” Beethoven to peek out in spots such as his jolly interruption of the slow movement and the Hungarianflavored finale.