Dropping into Emerald City Music’s French Café-Style Concert

Cover image: Peter Kolkay, bassoon (Photo courtesy artist)

An Emerald City Music concert in Seattle has a very different vibe from other classical concerts. It’s the atmosphere at 415 Westlake, primarily. The audience is largely younger—I saw only about a dozen grey/white heads Friday night—and the intermission ambiance and post-concert gathering is that of a really good party, as is the noise level of animated people discussing the concert. It’s also great to have the musicians joining the conversations with everyone then.

Most of this is due to the very hard work put in by young executive director Andrew Goldstein and young artistic director Kristin Lee, and their intuitive understanding of what young people are going to enjoy as a venue and by way of classical music. Both also have excellent contacts, so that the musicians who come in from all over the country and, next spring, from Denmark, are some of the best in their fields of the upcoming generation.

Friday night’s program was planned with homage to a group of French composers in the 1920s who rebelled against the heavy romanticism or lush imagery which had gone before. Collectively, they were called Les Six: Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, Louis Durey, and Germaine Tailleferre, composers who were more interested in a drier, sometimes more down-to-earth kind of music, though they all went their own individual ways.

Milhaud and Poulenc were their representatives on Friday’s program of music which might have been played in a French café, but it also included music by Camille Saint-Saëns, composing at the same time; Jean René Désiré Françaix, a few years later; and lastly a much more recent and non-French work which epitomized what the concert was intending to represent, Paul Schoenfield’s Café Music from 1985.

It wasn’t long after France discovered the solo and timbral possibilities of double-reed instruments that Saint-Saëns composed his fine 1921 Sonata for bassoon and piano. As bassoonist Peter Kolkay said as he talked briefly about the work (there are no written program notes for these concerts), it’s unusual for a bassoon work to be opening a concert. This piece was sheer pleasure to hear. The mellifluous sound of Kolkay‘s bassoon, beautifully textured and smooth, even in quality from the lowest notes to the highest, was something we rarely get to hear by itself. Julio Elizalde’s piano acted in duet, the two in balance in sections both fast and agitated or peacefully melodic.

We heard the bassoon again in Poulenc’s 1926 Trio with oboe and piano, and while we hear the oboe more prominently in orchestral solos quite often, here we had the opportunity to appreciate it as an equal with bassoon and piano. Oboist James Austin Smith played on an instrument made of blond maple. Smith says that while most oboes are made of grenadill, the dark wood we associate with them, Gebrueder Moennig in Germany is now able to use specially treated maple dense enough to withstand the pressure generated inside the instrument’s bore.

The timbre is the same however and Smith, Kolkay, and Elizalde made the most of a work Smith described as a little manic and a little nostalgic, but it’s also declamatory, sensuous and lyrical, flippant and fun. While many oboists use constant vibrato, Smith did not, making very clean harmonies with the other instruments, and as gorgeous as sound as Kolkay’s.

Milhaud, one of Les Six, wrote a Sonatina for oboe and piano many years after, in 1954 in Aspen, Colorado, years after he moved to this country’s west coast. This, too, is a perfect example of what was described at the concert as “high-class dinner music,” quite short, but as the movements are called accurately: with charm and vivacity, supple, clear, and with gaiety. Again, Smith and Elizalde made it seem something they could just toss off but the expertise and expression they put into it made the whole a little gem.

Lest some feel the strings were lacking, they too appeared, in a String Trio by Françaix, composed 1933 but light years away from the Poulenc from only seven years earlier. The harmonic palette is different, dryer and it is full of both a quirky humor and even sarcasm, as suggested by violinist Ian Swensen, plus some impish moments and mood change in the second movement, a more classical pensive aura to the third, and a robust, joyous fourth.

Violist Dmitri Murrath and cellist Michelle Djokic joined him for a beautifully balanced performance of what is a somewhat less accessible work at first hearing. It would need sophisticated cafe patrons.

Lastly came Schoenfield’s Café Music, a marvelously tongue-in-cheek, sassy trio for violin, cello and piano. As Elizalde commented at the start, this is one of the hardest pieces in the literature because of the fine line the musicians have to draw between the energy that doesn’t stop and sounding musical. I wish I could say the three of them, Elizalde, Swensen and Djokic, succeeded. But they ended up sounding as though they were trying too hard. This should be played with a lighthearted panache, but there was tension here, and it sounded hectic and earnest, while at times Elizalde exaggerated his part and overwhelmed the cello.

Nevertheless, this concert was a great success and leaves one looking forward to the next one, with the Daedalus Quartet, on November 30.