Great Music Zephyr’s Performance Friday Night Tosses Dreary Stereotypes Of Chamber Music To The Wind

Zephyr Friday, April 14, at The Met

Zephyr, Spokane’s 20th-century, classical, chamber music series, blows away a lot of stereotypes. The notion of 20th-century music as grim and unlistenable, the idea that chamber music is coolly genteel, the view that classical musicians are stiff and formal - these misconceptions go out the window at a Zephyr concert. There is cheeky spontaneity, an impulsive willingness to take chances in Zephyr’s concerts that makes the depth of what the listener hears all the more arresting.

Friday’s season finale at The Met featured an established classic and an undeservedly neglected work from the 1940s alongside a new piece by a composer new to Spokane. The players - Zephyr director and pianist Kendall Feeney, Spokane Symphony clarinetist James Schoepflin, violinist Elisa Barston from the St. Louis Symphony and cellist Peter Rejto, who teachers at Oberlin College in Ohio - have all been heard here on Zephyr programs before. They do not perform together regularly, but they made great music Friday.

Ingolf Dahl’s jaunty Concertino a Tre for clarinet, violin and cello opened Friday’s concert. Dahl was once considered a leader in the American branch of the neo-classic movement. Changing musical fashions have made both Dahl’s craftsmanship and crafty humor appear old-fashioned. The Zephyr performers brought out the ingredients Dahl put into the Concertino - the clear textures of Stravinsky, the angular, arching melodic lines of Copland, and hints of jazz licks and fiddle tunes.

Fun and whimsey are not dead in modern classical music, even today. David Jones, a new member of the music faculty at Eastern Washington University, responded to a commission from Zephyr with “Yes, the Fish Music,” a short work for clarinet and piano. The title of the piece, though not its contents, comes from a poem by Richard Brautigan. The subject is fish. Jones shifting harmonies suits the watery environment of the coho, the catfish and the beluga. Jones’ rhythms make his fish lunge and leap, swim lazily and dart about.

Feeney and Schoepflin seemed to take a physical as well as a musical pleasure in Jones’ mercurial rhythms and his distinctive use of growls and glissandos borrowed from jazz.

For this listener, one of this season’s peaks came in Barston, Rejto and Feeney’s gut-wrenching performance of Dmitiri Shostakovich’s Trio in E minor. This trio, written near the end of the Second World War, is not a work of sweet lyricism or creamy harmonic warmth. Despite its great technical difficulty for all three players, its interest does not lie in exhibitionistic virtuosity. It is a powerful musical commentary on the horrors of war.

Rejto set the haunting mood of Shostakovich’s Trio with the high, desolate whistling of its opening lament and was notable again in the intense, prayerful Largo. The Zephyr players’ willingness to allow their performance to careen to the very edge of spinning out of control served especially effectively in frenzy of the second-movement scherzo and the relentless dance macabre of finale.

Barston, Rejto and Feeney took chances with a challenging work and produced a winning performance.