Winter Chamber Music Fest is best game in town

DANIEL BUCKLEY

Tucson Citizen March 14, 2002

Basketball fans have March Madness to look forward to. But in the classical music world, the Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival is March's best game in town. With a splendid, nuance-rich performance of the Beethoven "Op. 20 Septet," eight days of concerts, open rehearsals, workshops and student performances came to a close Sunday at the Tucson Convention Center's Leo Rich Theatre.

Even for this event, which celebrates its 10th season next March, it was an incredible baker's week of music making. In part it was the peerless musicianship of the American String Quartet, cellist/artistic director Peter Rejto, violists Nicole Divall and Cynthia Phelps, bassoonist Lynette Cohen, horn player Kate Gascoigne, bassist Deborah Dunham, violinist Ani Kavafian, violinist/violist Ida Kavafian, clarinetist Jon Manasse, oboist Gerard Reuter, and pianists Rick Rowley and Anne-Marie McDermott that made the festival so stunning from the first bow draw to the last.

A big part, too, was the repertoire - eclectic, little-heard and largely sunny fare ranging from works of Mendelssohn, Mozart, Brahms, Schoenberg, Haydn, Poulenc and Milhaud to world premieres by contemporary American composers Curt Cacioppo and Augusta Read Thomas. Combine that with the evident camaraderie that these players mustered as they put the works together in the spirit of cooperation and artistic compromise that is the nature of chamber music and you have all the elements of sonic alchemy.

Certain pieces leaped out. Wednesday night's performance of the Mendelssohn "B-flat Major String Quintet" by the American String Quartet with violist Divall was a thing of bustling vitality and crisp execution. Benjamin Britten's "Lachrymae" (Reflections on a Song of John Dowland for Viola and Piano) likewise received a show-stopper performance by Phelps and Rowley. Sometimes lyrical and mysterious, at others dramatic and insistent, the two rendered its contrasts and colors with utmost sensitivity, sensuality and range.

]I do not believe I have heard Beethoven's "Quintet for Piano and Winds, Op. 16" better executed than the festival performance by Manasse, Rueter, Cohen, McDermott and Gascoigne. The phrasing was perfectly matched, the blend splendid, the tone of each player first-rate and issues of style and energy beyond reproach. Likewise, ASQ's account of Haydn's "Op. 50, No. 5 quartet" ("Der Traum") was elegant, energetic, witty and poised - the kind of performance that leaves many of its competitors in the dust.

Arnold Schoenberg's "Verklärte Nacht" in its original sextet form received a memorable reading by "Las Hermanas" Kavafian, Phelps, Rejto, ASQ members Daniel Avshalomov (viola) and David Geber (cello) with narrator Harold Dixon. []Carried to the hilt of its darkly romantic undercurrents and shimmering, moonlit release, this performance showed that meticulous preparation had paid off with an execution of flawless detail and penetrating drama. It was a risky programming move that proved well worth the effort.

For my money, any piece that had the Kavafian sisters and/or McDermott proved absolutely stunning. Great as the others were, these three were the festival's MVPs. McDermott's sparkle and verve, her endless variety of idiomatic ornamentation, her deft support and sensitivity to blend made her every moment at the keyboard a thing of genuine excitement in works by Poulenc, Franck, Schubert and Beethoven. Both Ida and Ani Kavafian likewise threw themselves into the bristling fire and pristine majesty of works by Mozart, Poulenc, Franck, Thomas, Schubert and Schoenberg, though nowhere more than in their vibrant, urgent, folk-infused account of Zoltán Kodály's "Serenade for Two Violins and Viola," with Phelps.

]That said, I have heard few wind players that could come close to Manasse, Cohen, Reuter and Gascoigne for sheer selfless artistry, flawless tone and color, and consummate virtuosity in the service of great music.

The biggest challenge for me is trying to convey something meaningful about Augusta Read Thomas' "Rumi Settings" for violin and viola, played by the Kavafian sisters last Tuesday. Based on a poem by Persian mystic Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-73) - founder of the Sufi order of whirling dervishes - this brilliant color study shares with its poetic inspiration a mystical power to move that transcends spoken language and enters the realm of pure feeling. It was passionate, bold and expressive at times, quietly edgy to frantic at others, and transcendental as smoke as thematic material passed from instrument to instrument in the same range to accent subtle differences in color.

A moment of silence separated its four movements, which closely followed the spirit of Rumi's text in the same way that the Schoenberg followed the emotional contours of Richard Dehmel's poem. In the end, I felt both moved and anxious to hear it again. It went by too quickly to fully drink in. But then, so poetry takes multiple readings to grasp with any real meaning, yet it's the blur of imagery and the emotions it evokes within us that make that journey so worthwhile. The same is true of Thomas' "Rumi Settings."

A week of this high degree of artistry leaves one both drained and eager to ride the roller coaster again. Just 12 more months to rest up.