Chamber Music: Masters’ Youth
SANTA FE, NM—For a month every summer, the Chamber Music Festival lights up the scene with 45 concerts by 87 musicians from all over the map, sometimes twice a day, mostly at the inviting fresco-festooned St. Francis Auditorium. There the small ensembles serve up the three B’s along with many other post-baroque figures, right down to living composers John Harbison and George Crumb, often as seen from an East Coast perspective.
I sauntered in casually for the Aug. 15 noon concert only to find it sold-out, and me on STAND-BY. While concerts elsewhere will shut down for as much as three months, Santa Fe is going strong.
The players were the Dover String Quartet, a powerful ensemble that had played S.F. Performances already this season. The foursome boasts a welcome individualism, with the strong cello and viola poised to take over at the drop of a bow. Together, the group’s play is committed, well-thought-out and virtuosic, bringing out the eloquence in youthful composers’ output.
The Anton Webern “Langsamer Satz” written at age 22 and then forgotten for half a century, is a masterful implicit homage to Mahler’s romanticism, carrying with it an intense sense of yearning. Benjamin Britten’s Quartet No. 1, written more than a generation later, harked back to an earlier era with its neoclassicism. Its later movements (within the traditional four) are enigmatic with their starts and stops. Throughout there are rapid shifts. Most striking of all is the opening, with the strings playing way up in “birdchirp-land,” pianissimo, above the audible limits of the ears of many present. Clearly the brash 27-year-old Britten was never reluctant to shock his listeners.
Beethoven’s “Serioso” Quartet Op. 95 was included, perhaps anticipating that composer’s upcoming 250th birthday next year, when the Dover players will return here. It was a no-holds-barred reading of this terse piece, five minutes shorter than the Britten.
SANTA FE (NM) Chamber Music Festival, July 14-Aug. 19, in daily changing programs. St. Francis Auditorium, Santa Fe. For SFCMF info: (505) 982-1890 or go online.
