Melinda Bargreen Music Review

By Melinda Bargreen
 

It was chamber music heaven on July 25^th in Nordstrom Recital Hall, from the opening phrases of Bach from cellist Johannes Moser to a fiery, incendiary main concert that made the audience temporarily forget an otherwise miserable day.
 

We had a new death count in the horrendous Norwegian terror disasters; desperate debt-ceiling discord in Washington, D.C a stormy end to the shortest (two-day) summer on record; and endless gloom from the Mariners, to whom the New York Yankees are currently being extremely mean. Not that all these miseries are comparable, but there was a sort of cumulative awfulness from near and far that would be enough to daunt the most cheerful.
 

However: We also had the Seattle Chamber Music Society, whose festival presented what I think I can safely call one of the greatest sonata performances ever given in this city. Violinist James Ehnes and pianist Jon Kimura Parker presented the challenging Prokofiev Violin Sonata in F Minor (Op. 80), in the kind of performance you wish you could take with you and listen to in your car, except that you might go off the road because this is music that demands complete attention.
 

Ehnes and Parker, both artists who began with this festival when they were barely out of their teens and have gone on to top international careers, absolutely own this sonata. They played with a level of absolute intensity and utter mastery that induces hyperventilation in the listener. From the spare, somber opening of the Prokofiev, dark and dangerous-sounding, Ehnes and Parker went on to playing of controlled ferocity and unearthly beauty. Ehnes’ muted scalar passages in the first movement sounded like eerie ghosts soaring through the hall; Parker attacked the keyboard in glittering cascades of sound that seemingly required the pianist to be everywhere at once.
 

The third-movement Andante temporarily moved the duo into a lush, delicious soundscape, for which Ehnes adjusted his vibrato to suitably romantic levels. (His sound is so beautiful that it is a pleasure just to hear him tune up.) And the finale (“Allegrissimo”) brought the players past any ordinary limits of what can be accomplished on those two instruments. The audience, which called the two artists back to the stage again and again with cheers and whistles, finally reeled dazedly out into the lobby for intermission. One thing’s certain: nobody needed any caffeine.

The excitement started long before, when German-Canadian cellist Johannes Moser lit up the audience with the first of the Bach Suites, the G Major. The articulate cellist preceded the performance by a chat with the listeners, noting that if there are 10 cellists in a room, there will be 11 opinions about interpreting the Bach Suites. We’ll bet none of them would have suggested sticking the short, thorny Lutoslawski “Sacher Variations,” complete with quarter-tones and lots of lugubrious glissandi, right smack in the middle of the G Major Bach Suite, which is precisely what Moser did. Cellists and cello fans sat up as if suddenly stabbed. It was a cheeky thing to do, but weirdly effective. It helps that Moser’s Bach was thoughtful, imaginative, and exquisitely refined.
 

The rest of the program also had its joys. The exuberant Dohnanyi Piano Quintet in C Minor (Op. 1) got a huge-scale performance, launched like a rocket from the keyboard of Anton Nel. The pianist and the four string players (Erin O’Keefe, Aloysia Friedmann, Richard O’Neill and Robert deMaine) created an orchestral sonority in a reading that was full of zest and vigor. O’Neill’s gorgeous viola solo in the Adagio movement was a reminder of what a huge asset he is to every ensemble.
 

The finale, the Shostakovich E Minor Piano Trio (Op. 67), is one of the landmark works of the 20^th century, searing in its impact: mournful, raucous, quietly despairing, and yet full of an almost frantic energy. From the hair-raising harmonics of the opening to the frenzied abandon of the final movement, this was an edgy performance that brought out the best in the three players (violinist Amy Schwartz Moretti, cellist Johannes Moser and pianist Craig Sheppard). The Scherzo movement shot past like a runaway train, as Moser launched himself at the cello, horsehair flying from his bow.
 

It was, in short, an evening few in the house will forget – proof again of the supreme power of music to jolt us out of our everyday lives, and into an entirely different world in which we are richly rewarded by the power of great talent.