Festival succeeds in some respects, but not in others

A decade ago, Seattle Chamber Music Festival (as it then was known) artistic director Toby Saks could program little more adventurous music beyond that of Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart. If she did, her audience just stayed away.

MUSIC REVIEW

SEATTLE CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY WINTER FESTIVAL

WHEN: Friday night

WHERE: Nordstrom Recital Hall

Today, after years of carefully and cleverly educating her listeners with less-known works along less familiar melodic lines by often unfamiliar composers, she can do as she did Friday night at Nordstrom Recital Hall -- program a work as exciting, atonal, almost shocking as Shostakovich's Sonata for Violin and Piano, and have the capacity audience applauding enthusiastically with bravos.

The occasion was the second concert of (now) Seattle Chamber Music Society's seventh Winter Festival, and the performers were violinist Scott Yoo and pianist Max Levinson. The two caught the undercurrents that seem to underlie all Shostakovich's work -- saying one thing, implying another, in the quieter outer movements as well as the strong, propulsive, thrilling second one. Absorbed and intent, they gave superb performances of very difficult material in a performance of close musical partnership, with a triumphant result.

That partnership seemed lacking, however, in Mozart's sunny Trio in E-Flat major, for clarinet (Frank Kowalsky), viola (Ulrich Eichenauer) and piano (Shai Wosner). Wosner's playing often overwhelmed the lovely tone and beautiful phrasing of the viola and clarinet and missed out on the interaction between instruments. In the pre-concert recital, Wosner, playing Beethoven's Sonata in E flat major from Opus 31, had given a performance that seemed less about Beethoven and more about Wosner's view of the composer. Youthful, brilliant and brash, it didn't engage this hearer.

The sense of ensemble without which no performance of chamber music can succeed, however well-played, was fully there in the concert's final work, Schubert's Quintet for Strings in C major.

Saks, a cellist who always performs in at least a few of the works in her festivals, is no longer technically at the same level as the superb players who now make up her artist rosters, but she is a consummate chamber musician with years of experience in the art. Violinists James Ehnes and Carmit Zori, violist David Harding and cellist Bion Tsang shared the stage with her in a performance that ranged from tenderly gorgeous to exuberantly light, with the balance and interplay of instruments shaping and weaving the musical lines to a perfect whole.

Freelancer Philippa Kiraly has been writing on classical music in Seattle since 1991.

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