Sublime Brahms and more
Johannes Brahms
Brahms’ Quintet for Clarinet and Strings flows along in surges and eddies of feeling, in subtle rhythmic crosscurrents, and a spectrum of hues reflecting blue skies and gray ones, dark depths and sparkling spillways. Thursday night, clarinetist Todd Levy and the Arcas String Quartet played Brahms’ Opus 115 so poetically, with such awareness and unanimity, that every last drop of the quintet took on a poignant presence, and those drops assembled into a coursing stream of unspeakable loveliness.
That’s enough to say about this exquisite performance, except to add the names of the skilled, committed and palpably alert young members of the Arcas Quartet: violinists Ilana Setapen and Margot Schwartz, violist Wei-Ting Kuo and cellist Peter Thomas.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
They played the Brahms at a Chamber Music Milwaukee program, a UWM Music Department series that never fails to deliver some such wonder. Judging by the small audience in the Bader Concert Hall in the UWM Zelazo Center, CMC remains the city’s best-kept musical secret. One more concert remains. You should go.
The Arcas, plus violist Jenny Kozoroz and minus violinist Schwartz, joined horn player Gregory Flint in Mozart’s Quintet for Horn, Violin, Two Violas and Cello, K. 407/386c. Flint had a few little glitches in pitch and articulation here and there, but not enough to cancel Mozart’s charm. He was at his best in the velvety, muted lyricism of the slow movement, a thing of great warmth and beauty.
Benjamin Britten
Oboist Margaret Butler, Schwartz, Kuo and Thomas collaborated on the Phantasy for Oboe and String Trio, Opus 2, a beguiling product of Benjamin Britten’s youth.
They took about 90 seconds to agree on pitch, but stayed firmly in the groove in every way for the remaining 15 or so minutes. The Phantasy, if not a march, exactly, is at least a jaunty stroll. It advances through maybe seven episodes, each with its own special ostinato in the strings. The violin goes to the fore in one such episode; in the rest, the oboe mostly plays free-ranging melodies, all of them related, over the string ostinati. Here’s the delightful part: The ostinati mutate unexpectedly and take on developmental interest. And they mostly comprise bits of melody that turn out to be components in the unfolding oboe line. So clever.
The Phantasy is rather like a stage play that’s less about plot and more word play. The musicians delivered the lines clearly, deftly, drolly.
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Dang. I was planning to go to this, then had to attend something else at the last minute. While I had a very enjoyable evening, it sounds as though I missed something really special…
This concert was refreshing in every way.
Britten so effortlessly open-air,
healthy Mozart with an unexpected tannin to it,
and the Brahms a model of tone color.
Mr. Levy would have had the full respect
of John Coltrane in those sublime infinity notes and
also including in those small places
where, as in the previous horn performance, natural
aberrations caused by the instruments’ own limits
are exploited to create wobbly or screaming sounds
which support, without recourse to dynamic accent,
the intensification of a certain idea in the music,
analagous to how effectively hip hop scrapes vinyl
as a percussive crescendo without a crescendo.
By joining forces with the Arcas String Quartet, Chamber Music Milwaukee has found a great match. This provides opportunity for a balanced selection of chamber works. And the Arcas has the opportunity to play quintets that would be difficult for them to arrange on their own.
The Arcas Quartet is relatively new, but built upon the best of the young Milwaukee Symphony players. Jennifer Snyder Kozoroz provides a valued supplemental resource as a “spare” violist.
I found the best match to be with oboist Margaret Butler. Britten’s Phantasy is a playful piece. The oboe sustained the lyric line across the more irregular string fragments.
The Brahms was sublime, but I found the effort to pace the work to explore “every last drop” resulted in a slow second movement that was often more ponderous than reflective.