Chesapeake Music brings a varied array to venerable chamber series
Chesapeake Music players performed Dvořák’s Piano Quartet No. 2 Saturday night in Easton, Maryland. Photo: Cal Jackson
Chesapeake Music has been presenting its summer music festival for forty years, in the historic town of Easton on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. The group also hosts a competition for young musicians and presents concerts throughout the year. Saturday evening’s chamber music concert, heard at the Prager Family Center for the Arts, featured some of the group’s veteran musicians alongside stars of the future.
The program opened with Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 5, an early work strongly influenced by one of Mozart’s quartets. The four performers included the festival’s co-artistic directors, violinist Catherine Cho and cellist Marcy Rosen, with Todd Phillips, playing viola for a change, and Carmit Zori at first violin. In their experienced hands, the first movement bounced along at a joyous tempo, with an audible wink at the unexpected measure of rest between thematic areas, after a surprise turn toward the minor key.
Zori and Cho matched one another elegantly in their introduction to the charming Menuetto, answered on the melody by Phillips’ viola. Cho took the lead comfortably in the Trio section, with exaggerated accents that unsettled the meter. The slow movement featured a warm, cohesive ensemble sound, its theme a simple canvas on which Beethoven sketched a series of diverting variations. Zori excelled in her triplet runs in the second variation, while the fifth variation, as brassy as a Sousa march, tested Rosen’s flexibility with its many leaps.
The quartet executed the perky Finale with plenty of flair, flying along at the Allegro assai tempo. At the top of the range, Zori’s tone wavered in intonation when pressed to loud dynamics. Rosen, who anchored this four-way conversation with graceful tone for the most part, tended to growl a bit in those full-bodied moments, which also destabilized the ensemble meld.
Albert Cano Smit performed piano works of Cecile Chaminade Saturday night. Photo: Cal Jackson
In the middle of the evening came two rarely heard character pieces by Cécile Chaminade, played by the thoughtful young pianist Albert Cano Smit. Chaminade, a prodigy as pianist, also impressed Bizet with her compositions when she was only 12 years old. Smit, deploying the una corda pedal, brought a fragile softness to the outer sections of her Étude de concert, Op. 35, no. 2 (“Automne”), mercurial rubato creating a whimsical sense of nostalgia. An equally virtuosic touch gave a stormy edge to the contrasting middle section (Con fuoco).
A similarly delicate approach imbued the Pièce humoristique, Op. 87, no. 4 (“Autrefois”) with a folkloric aura, like a quiet narration of an intimate tale. The middle section of this piece, a tribute to Domenico Scarlatti and baroque French composers, pulsated with remarkable facility of fingerwork, rounding out a diverting glimpse at this remarkable composer’s works.
Zori returned to the stage with a different assortment of musicians for Dvořák’s Piano Quartet No. 2. Smit turned pages for Robert McDonald, his one-time teacher at Juilliard, who led the work at the Steinway. The piece’s most expansive passages demand a more forceful sound than McDonald produced, but his poetic turn of phrase more than compensated for the occasional stickiness of running passages in the first movement.
The best moments came in the inner two movements, beginning with the longing cello theme of the slow movement, played by young cellist Sterling Elliott. Violist Zhanbo Zheng, whose tone had sounded a little nervous in his solos in the first movement, melded effortlessly with Elliott and Zori in the string-only sections of this gorgeous movement. McDonald applied a gossamer smoothness to his leading moments.
The third movement had a charming folksiness, particularly in the B section of the opening Ländler, with the augmented seconds of McDonald’s piano part adding a mysterious eastern European exoticism. The playful Trio, with rolling arpeggios and sprightly dotted rhythms, settled easily into place with a more slightly relaxed pacing.
Zheng produced a confident sound in his folk-inflected solo in the last movement, the most compact of the four. The dynamic climaxes of the piece dated more piano power yet still carried a fervent sense of triumph, sending off the audience into the humid June night.
Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Mendelssohn will be heard 5 p.m. Sunday, with the Juilliard String Quartet taking part in the three final concerts June 12 to 14. chesapeakemusic.org
