Keylin Adds Grace To Group’S Season Finale

Spokane String Quartet with Misha Keylin, violin and Janine Knox, piano Friday, June 9, The Met

The Spokane String Quartet, with violinist Misha Keylin, closed its concert season Friday night with solid performances punctuated by occasional bravura moments.

The concert’s highlight was experiencing the formidable musical versatility of the Russian-born violin virtuoso. Though just 30, Keylin is a veteran, having performed with great orchestras across the world in a career spanning more than two decades. The program included wickedly technical violin showpieces, a light-textured Beethoven sonata and a dense, demanding Brahms sextet. Keylin seemed equally at ease in all of them.

Framing Friday’s program were two 19th-century chamber music masterpieces: Beethoven’s “Sonata No. 5” for piano and violin, and Brahms’ “String Sextet in B-flat major, Op. 18.” Both go by the appropriate nickname “Spring,” and both were written early in their composers’ careers.

Beethoven’s elegant “Spring” sonata opened the program. Keylin was joined by pianist Janine Knox, a former Spokane resident now studying at Purchase College Conservatory in New York. She and Keylin were faithful - maybe a little bit too faithful - to the balanced, restrained classical style of early Beethoven. Once or twice, their crisp, restrained approach went stiff.

But stiffness wasn’t a problem in the remainder of the first half of the program. Keylin and Knox performed three distinctly different virtuoso compositions. Fritz Kreisler adapted the Rondo movement from Mozart’s “Haffner Serenade, K. 250,” adding his trademark: flashy cadenzas. Keylin tossed these off effortlessly, and did the same with Paganini’s “La Campanella.”

The most beautiful of the showpieces in the first half was Antonin Dvorak’s “Romance, Op. 11.” The violin and piano version performed by Keylin and Knox has gorgeous, exotic harmonies that disappear in the more commonly played version for violin and orchestra. In places, Knox seemed hesitant in her playing, but these scarcely marred the overall performance.

The second half of Friday’s program was dedicated to Brahms’ “Sextet, Op. 18.” Keylin and Jane Blegen took violin parts, Kelly Farris joined Claire Keeble on viola, and Spokane Symphony musician Jane Byrne joined John Marshall on cello.

The six played as if they had been together for years. Brahms’ composition is challenging because of its sustained density and the range of tone colors it demands. The work’s famous slow movement spins a somber theme through multiple variations, some of them dirgelike, others sounding like rolling seas and pealing bells.

In the final movement, Keylin and cellist John Marshall exchanged beautiful melodic passages. It was a satisfying end to a successful season.