Zephyr Opens With A Vibrant Sound
Zephyr Friday, Nov. 7, The Met
Paris was the city where the Roaring ‘20s roared loudest. Friday, Zephyr’s season-opening concert at The Met gave a sizable audience an entertaining glimpse into Parisian musical life of 75 years ago with a program of jazz-inspired, wackily irreverent chamber music.
Typical of the Zephyr series (“chamber music with an attitude,” remember), music by Ravel, Milhaud, Satie and Martinu was performed by flappers and tuxedoed gents who looked as though they had walked out of the pages of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. But they played and sang like vibrant musicians caught up in the ‘20s spirit.
Even the liveliest parties sometimes get off to a slow start.
The Zephyr players made Bohuslav Martinu’s “Le revue de cuisine” seem a little stiff and uncertain.
There were some dandy moments such as the sinuous duet in the “Tango” between clarinetist Anthony Taylor and bassoonist Lynne Feller-Marshall later joined by the muted trumpet of William Berry.
But I waited in vain for the party to cut loose and wail in the Martinu’s “Charleston.” The musicians sounded tentative and mannerly, instead.
The results were smiles and giggles, not raucous laughter and wild dancing.
Things livened up with Maurice Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Piano. It took nearly five years for Ravel to finish this piece, but Seattle violinist Leonid Keylin and Zephyr’s Kendall Feeney made it as fresh and spontaneous as though the composer had tossed it off between shows at his favorite cabaret.
Keylin’s insinuating slides and suggestive phrasing in the “Blues” movement reminded me how much Ravel is said to have admired the American dancer and singer, Josephine Baker.
The energy and dash Keylin and Feeney brought to the “Perpetum mobile” finale was breathtaking.
The songs of Erik Satie are rarities on the concert stage. Like the composer himself, they are … well, eccentric. Soprano Tamara Schupman let the audience share her own enjoyment of the inspired near-nonsense of Leon-Paul Fargue’s bizzare texts in “Ludions” and the coquettish flirting of “La Diva de L’Empire,” a song Satie wrote for Paulette Darty - a voluptuous music hall performer of the day.
Zephyr’s Parisian party came to a roistering close with Feeney’s and Greg Presley’s romp through Daris Milhaud’s piano duet version of “Le boeuf sur le toit.” The work is better known in its orchestral version, but the clarity and bounce of the duet arrangement makes its delirious interweaving of popular tunes and dance rhythms and its collision between different keys all the more entertaining.
The buoyant music making along with Feeney’s informative, witty spoken introductions and the charm of the period costumes and stage sets made for an enchanting evening.
, DataTimes