The Seattle Chamber Music
Society’s Summer Festival, July 7
By Melinda Bargreen
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July 7 was a hot night for local music lovers – but not because of Seattle’s soaring ambient temperatures. Inside Benaroya Hall’s Nordstrom Recital Hall, the heat was generated by a small corps of Seattle Chamber Music Society players, serenading a near-capacity crowd with Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Schoenberg.
Schoenberg is generally a guaranteed audience repellent; applied liberally, it is most effective in clearing an auditorium of listeners. But chamber music cognoscenti know that this particular piece, “Verklärte Nacht,” was composed before Schoenberg went over to the atonal Dark Side (serialism, or the twelve-tone technique of composition Schoenberg later pioneered). “Verklärte Nacht” is a richly scored late-Viennese sextet, full of restless shape-shifting chromaticism that resolves into passages of almost unearthly beauty – especially when the piece gets a performance like this one.
James Ehnes, the Grammy-winning violinist who also is associate artistic director of the festival, took a strong and assertive lead in the ensemble, whose other members included violinist Augustin Hadelich, violists Cynthia Phelps and Richard O’Neill, and cellists Bion Tsang and Robert deMaine. It tells you something about the depth of talent here when you have a bona fide star like Hadelich (Avery Fisher Career Grant, Indianapolis Violin Competition gold medalist) playing second fiddle.
This was a group whose members listened to each other with the kind of expert intensity that makes for first-class chamber music. Intervals were concise; entrances and shifts in tempo and dynamics were made with a precision and expertise that bespeaks a real knowledge of this complex, gorgeous work. The audience, rapt and spellbound, knew something quite special was happening on the stage.
But the Schoenberg wasn’t the only excitement of the evening. Mendelssohn’s familiar D Minor Piano Trio (Op. 49) got a white-hot performance from violinist Andrew Wan, cellist Edward Arron, and pianist Adam Neiman. (Neiman also took over for his indisposed colleague Andrew Armstrong in the program’s opener, the Schumann Violin Sonata No. 1, with violinist Erin O’Keefe.)
The Mendelssohn players looked at each other far more than they glanced at the music, working to build a beautifully unified approach to this classic trio. Arron, in particular, impressed with his dark, smoky cello tone, the kind of sound that just bewitches the ear.
The three players headed into the third Scherzo movement as if going for a new land speed record, which they just might have achieved. Neiman sent shimmering cascades of notes up and down the keyboard and near-impossible velocity; somehow his and the string players’ efforts were so closely coordinated that the Scherzo sounded lighter than air.
Yes, the green sylvan ambience of the festival’s home for the previous 28 years (the Lakeside School) is missing from this new downtown version. But the delighted audiences who spilled out into the Nordstrom Recital Hall lobby after the incendiary Mendelssohn weren’t buzzing about the change in picnic facilities or the formerly-free intermission coffee. They were excited about the music and the musicians – just as these audiences always have been. Green lawns are all very nice, but sizzling Schoenberg is priceless.
