Washington Classical Review

Pianist Wu Han performed at Wolf Trap’s chamber concert Friday night. Photo: Lisa-Marie Mazzucco

Friday evening’s concert by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center offered a moment of bittersweet reflection in the Barns at Wolf Trap. Wu Han anchored a meaty program centered on two unusual piano quintets for the finale of the Chamber Music at the Barns series. An alluring program capped the first season under her successor as artistic director of the series, violinist Daniel Hope.

Sadly, CMS will not return to the Barns for an entire year, at the end of next season, recently announced by Wolf Trap. At the post-intermission talk, Wu Han spoke of how this evening’s program, planned two years ago, came in response to the growth of the chamber music audience at the Barns, in both size and discernment. Hope’s second season, by contrast, will feature a number of “classical lite” concerts, including mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe in a cabaret program, guitarist Pablo Sainz-Villegas, and the crossover trio Time for Three.

It is important then to savor the vestiges of Wu Han’s remarkable tenure at Wolf Trap. As palate cleanser before each of the piano quartets, the evening’s two violinists, Chad Hoopes and Richard Lin, offered rarely heard violin duos. The more remarkable of them, Jean-Marie Leclair’s Sonata for Two Violins in E Major (Op. 12, no. 2), from around 1747, opened the evening in a burst of bright, bubbly energy.

In the two outer movements of four, Hoopes (on first violin) and Lin exchanged melodic and accompanying roles regularly. Lin’s smaller, slightly darker timbre gave the sense of an elusive twin shadowing his more assertive brother. The inner movements put Hoopes in the spotlight, especially plangent in the slow movement, with its echoes of Vivaldi. Lin took the lead in the minor-mode Trio of the Minuetto.

On the second half, Giovanni Battista Viotti’s Duo in G major for Two Violins, composed around 1790, offered fewer delights. For this work, which mostly featured the two parts equally, Lin took the first violin part. Each showed panache in mini-cadenzas in the first movement, but some minor intonation and rhythmic disagreements came to the fore in this less interesting score.

Anton Arensky’s Piano Quintet in D Major followed the Leclair piece, with Wu Han’s powerful sound as foundation. All four string players responded with robust sound, not always impeccably in tune but with ferocity. Violist Milena Pájaro-van de Stadt, formerly of the Dover Quartet, stood out for her exceptionally rich, deep tone. The second movement, in the form of poignant variations, featured charming solo sections for piano and for cellist Dmitri Atapine, who responded with a consistently warm sound on the A string.

The composer’s use of repeated chords as a motif in the piano made the Scherzo a little clunky at times. A Trio of contrasting character focused on the luscious sound of the string quartet, led with broad vibrato by Lin on first violin, a section of music that came back after the return of the Scherzo. The Finale opened with an approximation of fugue, abandoned after the entry of two voices for vignettes without counterpoint, including the review of themes from earlier movements.

In the highlight of the evening, the Piano Quintet in A Minor, Saint-Saëns took up in 1855 the genre that Robert Schumann had used so memorably a decade earlier. As with much of Saint-Saëns’s chamber music, the challenging piano part is the undisputed heart of the affair. Wu Han dominated the texture with the bold chords of the opening theme, endless figuration, and delicate cadenza-like reflections.

As with the Arensky quintet, the solemn second movement stood out, from the piano’s tender introduction to dream-like sections for muted strings. Wu Han’s endless, fluid run of sixteenth notes enlivened the daring Scherzo, a thrilling escapade from its surprise start to its finish. Saint-Saëns, who later served as organist at the church of La Madeleine in Paris for almost twenty years, showed a much more thorough grasp of how to write a fugue in his Finale. The string quartet displayed intensity and independence of line in the exposition of this movement, matched by Wu Han later when the piano took up the subject.

At a reception of desserts and champagne, the audience toasted the end of the chamber music season at Wolf Trap. In a surprise announcement, Wolf Trap vice-president Lee Anne Myslewski gave a tribute to Rich Kleinfeld, who is stepping down as host of the radio broadcasts of Wolf Trap concerts. His post-intermission talk with the performers, a tradition going back to the start of the chamber music series, was his last.

Daniel Hope performs in two concerts next season at Wolf Trap, one with pianist Maxim Lando and the other with Simon Crawford-Phillips. Other classical programs will feature the Zukerman Trio, the Leonkoro Quartet, and Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. wolftrap.org