Chamber music festival debuts a romantic trio

There is a lot to be said about the Seattle Chamber Music Festival concert Friday night at Lakeside School.

In addition to a work of genius, Dvorak's Piano Quintet in A, which concluded the program, there was Strauss' E-flat Violin Sonata and the world premiere of a trio for clarinet, cello and piano.

Feeling the taste of its audience is essentially conservative and thus does not like contemporary music, the festival has kept its distance from the newest of the new. That stance was broken with the creation of a commissioning club, the point of which is to commission a new work for the chamber music society. Its first product made its bow Friday.

The composer is not known here: Ronn Yedidia is Israeli, as were the evening's first-class musicians: clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein, cellist Amit Peled and pianist Alon Goldstein. Just as the Trio's scoring is unique, so is its style: "a romantic composition in the vein of 19th- and early-20th-century masters," Yedidia wrote in the program. It is a brave thing to do, even in these pluralistic days, particularly music that is so retrograde in content and matter. The most important thing, once prejudice about returning to the past is put aside, is the question: Does the piece work without sounding like a cliche or a pastiche of old mannerisms? It does.

Putting the clarinet in the place of the violinist is a novel idea and while the instrument does not make quite the impact of the latter, it lends character. Yedidia is comfortable in this idiom and writes well in it, without apology or fuss. He has melodic ideas, which he expresses with finesse, and enough edge to give contrast to those smooth-limbed pleasantries. In fact, some of the most compelling writing came when he was in that mode.

Dvorak's great quintet has closed many festival nights, sending audiences out into the night on a sunbeam. Violinists Nicola Benedetti and Erin Keefe, violist Richard O'Neill, cellist Joshua Roman and pianist Andrew Armstrong did not fail in their duty. They played with unmistakable vigor, polished musicality and technical finesse. Indeed, the playing was so telling, it was visceral. This is not a question of simply fast and loud, as we have heard on previous nights, but music that made sense for all the right reasons. Thanks particularly to Benedetti, O'Neill and Armstrong.

Violinist Stefan Jackiw and pianist Jeremy Denk were a convincing pair in the Strauss.