August 26, 2008
Chamber Musicians Felt the Love
The accomplishments of The Perlman Music Program were quite apparent at a concert on Friday marking the close of its Chamber Music Workshop.
The program was founded by Toby Perlman 15 years ago, with Ms. Perlman as its director and a faculty of about 20, including of course the distinguished Itzhak Perlman. This summer it had about 80 participants. Originally a two-week session held at Boys Harbor in East Hampton, it now has its own 28-acre campus overlooking the water in Shelter Island Heights.
At the center of the program for string players and pianists are its two summer sessions: a music school for students from 11 to 18 in the beginning of the summer and a Chamber Music Workshop for students 18 to 30 in August.
The program also arranges a winter residency in Sarasota, Fla., a yearlong mentorship program in New York City, and occasional international tours. Many of the students return year after year. At this concert we heard two ensembles that are onstage together regularly, as well as two that were assembled during the two-week workshop.
Members of the first group to perform, the LK Quartet, are alumni of the summer school, and now play music professionally, including at the Neue Galerie New York and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Their rendition of Franz Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet in G sparkled and bounced with animation and precision.
At the opening moments, when the playful themes were tossed from one instrument to another, one could see the delight and intensity in the faces of the players, Sean Lee and Areta Zhulla, violins, Laura Seay, viola, and Jordan Han, cello.
This quartet is from Opus 76, and is one of Haydn’s last. Although it is a mature work, it is filled with humor, whimsy, and surprise. The composer, in fact, was a practical joker, as was notably evident in the third and fourth movements with scurrying themes, sudden fortissimos, unexpected rests, and surprise endings. It is not easy to communicate all of this with artistry and grace, but the LK Quartet did it superbly.
Although the Harlem Quartet’s mission is to “advance diversity in classical music while engaging young and new audiences through the discovery and presentation of varied repertory, highlighting minority composers,” it performed the String Quartet in C minor by Johannes Brahms, certainly a mainstay of the traditional repertory.
The group is made up of Ilmar Gavilan and Melissa White, violins, Juan-Miguel Hernandez, viola, and Desmond Neysmith, cello, all of whom are “first-place laureates” of the Sphinx Competition held annually in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Detroit, and are on the faculty of the Sphinx Performance Academy for young black and Latino string players in Natick, Mass.
The Brahms piece is filled with restless, yearning, and probing qualities, and is about as contrasting to the Haydn as could be. The Harlem Quartet did an admirable job of carrying off this serious, intense, and complex music.
In the last movement, the sound of the four quartet members was fuller and well blended, and they really took off until, toward the end, their bows were flying and they vigorously attacked the strings before coming to the final resonant minor chord.
The audience at this concert was perhaps the most excited and enthusiastic of any that I have seen this summer, and it did not want to miss an opportunity to offer applause accompanied by “oohs” and whistles — even between individual movements of larger works, as is customarily not done in classical music.
Merry Peckham, the associate director of the Perlman Program, who was the M.C. for the evening, and who had cheerily asked the audience to welcome each group of players “with love,” said after the intermission that she understood how the concertgoers would feel so moved to applaud so freely and so often.
But she urged some restraint in those “so-much-for-that-tradition moments”: Try to “feel the silence between each movement as it takes you into the next one,” thus building the excitement until it is finally let loose at the end, she said. The audience complied for the rest of the evening — almost.
Bela Bartok was a Hungarian composer and a scholar of Central European folk songs. The way that his style evolved is reflected in his String Quartet No. 2, in which the first movement begins in a late-romantic style, the second movement uses Hungarian folk idioms and rhythms, and the third movement represents Bartok’s more individual abstract style.
This work was performed by Nicole Leon and Dorothy Ro, violins, Milena Pajaro-Van de Stadt, viola, and Kevin Downs, cello, who had only been playing together for the last two weeks. Their rich sound was apparent at the beginning, where the dissonances picked up more or less where the just-heard Brahms quartet left off.
In the Allegro Molto Capriccioso there were some driving, demanding themes and quieter buzzing motifs that were played with intensity. The players brought out the heavy, convulsive longing in the Lento. The closing pizzicatos, feeling almost unfinished, were followed by a moment of rapt silence as the musicians’ bows came down slowly in an almost choreographed moment.
Another ensemble that had been playing together just during the workshop, this time of five players, closed the concert. Michelle Ross and Ann-Sophie Anderson, violins, Molly Carr, viola, Nicolas Olarte-Hayes, cello, and Peter Dugan, piano, played the Brahms Piano Quintet in F minor.
Though Brahms is never light, it was clear from the first theme that it was penned at an earlier and less troubled time in the composer’s life than the quartet heard before, and the group played with a mature sound and glorious excitement.
The “Romanze” with its pure romantic melody was enchanting, and the Scherzo was fiery. All of the players were impassioned; I wished that Mr. Dugan, who seemed to exude it the most in his movements, weren’t so hidden by the other players, at least from where I was sitting.
There were two more concerts on Saturday featuring the rest of the outstanding young artists at the Perlman Music Program, some of whom will become the great artists of tomorrow.
