The Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Summer Festival is off to a fine start. Nordstrom Recital Hall was packed for the free recital before the second concert Wednesday night, and the concert itself was sold out. This entire festival is dedicated with love to the founding artistic director, Toby Saks, who died last summer just as the festival ended; and also to Gladys Rubinstein, a stalwart supporter for many years, who died this year.
In the recital and as the last item on the concert program, artistic director James Ehnes and Amy Schwartz Moretti, violins, Richard O’Neill, viola and Robert deMaine, cello, played Beethoven quartets, the first No. 4 in C Minor from Op. 18, and the second No. 1 in F Major from the Op. 59 of some six years later.
The four musicians, all long-time participants in the festival, had found that playing together was so satisfying to them they decided to become a formal quartet, the Ehnes Quartet, last January. They have been in considerable demand outside the festival.
It shows in their playing. The matching instrument sound and tonal colors, particularly the blending of Ehnes and Moretti—if you are not looking you can’t tell who is playing what—; the fine sense of dynamics—this is a group not afraid to play very softly as well as a rousing forte to create exciting or memorable effect; the togetherness and precision, though there were a couple of moments in both quartets when an attack was not quite perfect; all this gives us a chance to hear an emerging group which may come to equal the best the world has to offer.
Among notable moments were the sprightly Andante of the C Minor and the ensuing anticipatory, tense Menuetto. In the F Major, the stand out was the grieving sadness of the Adagio movement. We always think of a major key as being happy, but not here. They played it mostly relaxed and soft with raw feeling obtruding dynamically.
If these weren’t enough to send the audience away happy, the program included two more works in stellar performances.
Stravinsky’s Octet for Winds had four winds and four brass players on stage at once, a first for the festival. After the dissonant entry in which the listener’s ears change centuries, it bursts forth into music unmistakably Stravinsky even if this is a first hearing of the piece. He uses the instruments as he had in Petrouchka, making the most of the different timbres and sounding like a fairground. Great fun to hear, but I was glad to be sitting close to the back of the small concert hall when both trombones, and both trumpets were in full swing. Players were Lorna McGhee, flute; Anthony McGill, clarinet; Stéphane Lévesque and Seth Krimsky, bassoons; Jens Lindemann and David Gordon, trumpets, and Ko-ichiro Yamamoto and Carson Keeble, trombones, several of them newcomers to the festival line-up.
The fine Beethoven, the delightful Stravinsky notwithstanding, the highlight of the program for this listener came with Mendelssohn’s Trio No. 1 in D Minor for violin (Augustin Hadelich), cello (Efe Baltacigil) and piano (Jon Kimura Parker).
From the first notes of Baltacigil’s cello, so warm, deep and furry you could bury yourself in it, the sweet answering tones of Hadelich’s violin and the subtle nuances created on the piano by Parker, it was a joy to hear. Elegant phrases in the first movement, singing melodies creating an emotionally-felt second, and what sounded like fireflies, so fast and light and musically lit up, in the third, brought storms of applause with bravos to the third bows. Judging by the grins on the players, they must have realized what an epic performance they had achieved.
Three more weeks to come in the festival and several freebies as well.
