Cover photo: Emerald City Music co-founder Kristin Lee (Photo: ECM)
The youngest chamber music series in the Northwest, Emerald City Music, began on a very high note last September and has continued on that level, with its latest offering here Friday night: a combination of the romantic—Dvořák, Arensky, and Brahms—and the mid-20th century, Martinů. (There are three more concerts in this series, the next in Seattle on March 17.)
All Seattle concerts are presented in the back room of Kakao coffeehouse on Westlake Avenue in South Lake Union, an excellent space for chamber music with a high rounded wood ceiling, albeit with a somewhat audible heating system (a plus: easy, free parking nearby). The set-up is informal, with preconcert drinks part of the ticket price, the musicians mingling among the concertgoers and taking turns giving spoken program notes before each work played.
Seven musicians: Tessa Lark, artistic director Kristin Lee and Ani Kavafian, violins: Roberto Diaz and Yura Lee, violas; and Ani Aznavoorian and David Requiro, cellos; all of them with prestigious awards and careers (despite the youth of several), played the program in different instrumental combinations.
Dvořák’s Terzetto, not a familiar work with its unusual choice of two violins and viola and very central European in feel, gave a chance for the deep resonance and gorgeous quality of Yura Lee’s viola to shine out, violas so often being buried in the middle, essential but less noticed.
Arensky’s better-known String Quartet No. 2 also has an unusual figuration, one violin, one viola and two cellos, and this too gave prominence to the rich and weightier lower strings. The work has a Tchaikovsky song as a base for one movement and a Russian funeral melody in another, and the performance with Kristin Lee, Diaz, and the two cellists ranged from gentle and somber, to mournful and calm, to urgent and light, shaped and nuanced all through.
Martinů’s Three Madrigals for violin and viola from 1947 presented perhaps the highlight of the concert for sheer musical interest. Played with unobtrusively expert technique and a sense of being inside the music, Lark and Yura Lee made the first madrigal seem like two people talking to each other excitedly without drawing breath. The next had soft muted fluttering and swoops like a tottering crone’s walk, and phrases played together at the same exact intervals without vibrato, completely clean, remarkable.
The last madrigal had subtle Bach-like influences at times in rhythms and phrasing though not harmonically, and again, the two played in perfect synchrony. It would have been worth hearing all over again.
With dessert for last, the musicians performed Brahms Sextet No. 2 with energy and sensitive interplay.
One of the pleasures of hearing chamber music in a chamber, as originally intended, rather than in a large auditorium, is that musicians can play as softly as a thread of sound and yet be heard by the entire audience. At the same time, they do not have to play fortissimos at a level to be heard in the last row of a concert hall’s third tier, when instead no one in the audience is more than 25 feet away. Some of this program could have benefited from less forceful fortes.
So far ECM has presented four programs in Seattle, three repeated in Olympia and one in Tacoma, and before this weekend’s concert it had already reached 1100 listeners. According to executive director Andrew Goldstein, ECM has so far given 25 more concerts out in the community and has begun a chamber music project in the Olympia School District connecting chamber music to the curriculum that the students are currently learning.
