AFCM homepage
REVIEW
Tuesday, 10 March 1998
By Ken Keuffel Jr.
THE ARIZONA DAILY STAR
Much music-making remains before the hot and fallow summer arrives. So proclaiming one event the jewel in this season's musical crown would be premature.
But certainly, the weeklong Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival, which concluded Sunday, has emerged as a shining gem.
The Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, the festival's presenter, is celebrating its 50th anniversary season; it wanted an event at the Leo Rich Theatre that chamber music fans would remember for a long time.
Peter Rejto, the festival's artistic director and a stellar cellist, gave them one.
So did 10 other musicians and the festival's two core ensembles - the Los Angeles Piano Quartet, in which Rejto is a cellist, and the Chicago String Quartet.
The rarely played sextets, trios and duos the festival favored never sounded so good.
Highlights from this literature included double bassist Edgar Meyer performing his Trio No. 1 for violin, cello and double bass, and a 1924 string sextet by Ervin Schulhoff, a Czech composer who perished in a German concentration camp.
For the first time, too, the festival offered a commissioned work: Piano Quartet No. 2 by British-American composer Gerard Schurmann. The Los Angeles Piano Quartet's account of this dynamic three-movement work was both precise and eloquent at the rehearsal I heard.
It illuminated Schurmann's command of several styles (Romantic to serialistic) and his ability to fully integrate the piano into string textures (with, for instance, a vigorous fugue in the third movement). The Friends, which paid $15,000 for the Schurmann quartet, got its money's worth.
The Edgar Meyer piece featured, in addition to the composer on bass, violinist Ani Kavafian and cellist Gary Hoffman. Meyer almost danced to the infectious rhythms of this jazz- and folk-flavored ditty, and the other instrumentalists reacted with stylistically sympathetic contributions of their own.
The bottom line: Good chamber music needn't always be so serious. And it wouldn't hurt the festival to program more serious fun in the future.
Few chamber pieces can scare an audience out of its wits. The Schulhoff, heard on Sunday, is one of them.
Written in four movements for pairs of violins, violas and cellos, this somewhat atonal work integrates innovative string writing into various styles, from late Romanticism to Bartókian folklorism. Its dark and frightening nature manifests itself in eerie effects, such as muted tremolo figures played close to the bridge and droning notes in the cello.
The work also draws on a myriad of combinations. At one point in the final movement, for instance, Carmit Zori played a rhapsodic solo. Cellists Rejto and Christopher Constanza droned away and violinist Ayako Yoshida joined violists Kathrine Murdock and Nicole Divall in producing ostinato wave figures reminiscent of Philip Glass.
The second andante movement concluded with a sustained chord ending in a faint pizzicato pop.
Curiously, not everything at this year's festival got off to an auspicious beginning.
For starters, violinist Josef Suk, the grandson of Czech composer Josef Suk (1874-1935) and great-grandson of Antonin Dvorák, dropped out 10 days before the festival for health reasons.
This left Rejto scrambling to engage other festival violinists to perform the pieces in which Suk was scheduled to appear. Fortunately, festival musicians rose to the occasion: Los Angeles violinist Ayako Yoshida, backed by pianist James Bonn, offered a sizzling account of Beethoven's A-Major Sonata (``Kreutzer''). And Zori proved a fine substitute first violinist in Schumann's Piano Quintet.
Another crisis: Just one day before the festival opened, the Friends learned that nearly 300 area students would not attend a Thursday morning Youth Concert. It appears that misunderstandings and bureaucratic bungling were to blame.
Jean-Paul Bierny and other board members got on the phone. Somehow, hundreds of new students were enticed to come to Leo Rich at the last minute. Students from two schools actually walked to the performance.
The place was reportedly so full that some students had to sit in the aisles and in the upstairs recording booth.
As usual, University of Arizona professor John Fitch provided excellent commentary before each concert. Specifically, the 20-minute sessions showcased Fitch's ability to cover a few key points about each piece; those who heard them enhanced their listening experience considerably.
There was also the pithy anecdote: Schulhoff, we learned, wrote popular music under several pseudonyms to make money, and the jazz he loved influenced several compositions. Max Bruch wrote eight pieces for piano (transcribed for harp at the festival), viola and clarinet with his clarinetist son in mind.
Each concert was well-attended and received, but at least 20 or 30 seats at each concert remained stubbornly unfilled. That's a shame, especially for students. Or is a discounted ticket price of $5 too expensive?
Ideally, more University of Arizona music professors would attend the concerts and lean on their students to come with them. That's what happened Wednesday when Patrick Neher, the University of Arizona's professor of double bass, and his students heard Meyer perform his string trio.
I doubt they were disappointed.