Superb music reigns at chamber fest

The Seattle Chamber Music Festival this season is becoming something of a Johnny One Note: sweet sun and blue sky overhead, sold-out houses and first-class music making.

Monday night's concert at Lakeside School, the first concert of the third week, was no exception. A Mozart quintet and Schumann quintet, scored for different instruments, were the bookends to the concert, with a world premiere in the middle. The evening was remarkably felicitous.

Jeffrey Cotton's music, a string sextet, entered the festival repertory for the first time six years ago. This summer another work, "Six Departures," was commissioned by the Seattle Chamber Music Society Commissioning Club, a small group of patrons committed to brand-new work. The trio, scored for flute, viola and harp, is a piece of some merit, particularly in its writing for individual instruments, where Cotton seems to have his most original ideas (although on occasion his duos almost equally compelling).

The viola appears to have special significance to Cotton. He exploits the instrument not for its tonal glory but for its grittiness and the way it can lend weight to rhythmic passages. Cotton responds to the penetrating metal softness of the flute and the clarity of the harp. Just as Debussy's Sonata of 1915, after which Cotton modeled this trio, is about understatements, so is Cotton's work. The quiet shifting of moods is also present. Still, this is not an easy combination of instruments, and sometimes that got the better of him. The musicians were excellent: Lorna McGhee, flute; David Harding, viola, Heidi Krutzen, harp.

Mozart was very pleased with his E-flat Quintet for piano and winds, calling it, in a letter to his father in 1784, "the best work I have ever composed." Given the performance on Monday by oboist Nathan Hughes, clarinetist Sean Osborn, bassoonist Seth Krimsky, French hornist Jeffrey Fair and pianist Jeremy Denk, it is not hard to share Mozart's enthusiasm for this work. It is ebullient, charming, expansive, wonderfully proportioned. Good humor tumbles from nearly every corner. The five musicians captured that, making important points along the way and maintaining a perfect balance among themselves. The ensemble was precise, their ears so carefully tuned to one another the whole enterprise was lifted into another realm. The work is only now making its debut at the festival. I hope we won't have to wait 27 years to hear it again.

Schumann's great E-flat Piano Quintet is not a novelty in Seattle or anywhere else. It is regarded the composer's most popular chamber music work, one which inspired other works later in the 19th century. Its bounty for invention is enormous. The five musicians -- violinists Lily Francis and Jun Iwasaki, violist Richard O'Neill, cellist Ronald Thomas and pianist Anna Polonsky -- played with panache and savoir-faire.

However, I wished Polonsky had not been so worried about dominating the proceedings, as it is easy to do given the nature of what Schumann wrote. She was discreet when boldness was the order of the day.