A good time was had by all, including the audience that filled the Neurosciences Institute auditorium to capacity June 6, the opening concert of the 2007 Mainly Mozart Festival.
Violinists Martin Chalifour and Ida Levin, violist Che-Yen Chen, cellist Andrew Shulman and pianist Anne-Marie McDermott performed a well-chosen program that showed off their intelligence, wit and high spirits. The entire evening brimmed with the joy of reunion.
Chalifour (concertmaster, Los Angeles Philharmonic) and Levin (Boston Chamber Music Society) began with Ludwig Spohr’s unaccompanied Duo in D, Opus 67, No. 2, a lush, unaccompanied work for two virtuoso players, rife with hair-trigger tradeoffs of melody and accompaniment. The equally matched pair made it seem so easy. It is difficult to choose which possesses the more beautiful tone quality.
Levin was joined by McDermott (an artist of Lincoln Center), Chen (principal viola, San Diego Symphony) and Shulman (former principal cello, Los Angeles Philharmonic) for a brilliant rendition of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Quartet in E flat, K. 493, The playing of this work was subtly shaped and blessed with a breath-taking conclusion to the final Allegretto.
Following the interval, Levin and Chalifour performed Sergei Prokofiev’s Sonata in C for Two Violins, Opus 56, sometimes sweetly diabolical, then poignant, now fraught and angular. It is equal to the Spohr in difficulty, and the listener was especially moved by the indescribably sere Comodo (quasi allegretto) movement, which seems to put one somewhere in the desert of the New World with Puccini’s dying Manon for company.
The program concluded with McDermott, Chalifour, Chen and Shulman’s performance of Gabriel Faure’s Piano Quartet No. 1 in C minor, Opus 15. The music might be described as robust impressionism (tending toward romanticism) that is melodically sweeping and passionate from start to finish.
The elegant McDermott was a sensitive collaborator indeed in this varied program that utilized each player so beautifully.
Sunday, June 10, included a return to the Neurosciences Institute to hear McDermott’s solo recital of works by Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), who was a great inventor and enhancer of musical form. Haydn fits into a Mozart festival by virtue of his contemporaneity with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) and by inference, perhaps, on his possible influence on the younger composer’s style: Hayden created freedom and Mozart expanded on it.
A felicitous relationship exists between Haydn’s sense of humor and joy and that of pianist McDermott. She has the ability to make the Adagio of Haydn’s Piano Sonata in F Major, Hob.XVI:23 ethereal and serene, then jumps into the majestic chords and surprising noodlings of the Adagio in the Sonata in C Major, Hob.XVI:50. Aside from her playing, McDermott delightedly explained the composer’s use of fermata and the importance of the ensuing silence in his music.
A great favorite of local audiences, McDermott has appeared on Mainly Mozart’s programming for ten years.
Upcoming Mainly Mozart concerts:
“¢ 8 p.m. Saturday, June 16, at Qualcomm Hall, 5775 Morehouse Drive, San Diego 92121, violinist William Preucil (concertmaster, the Cleveland Orchestra) and pianist Kirill Gerstein join artistic director David Atherton and the Mainly Mozart Festival Orchestra in performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending” and Felix Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in G Minor, Opus 25, respectively. Also programmed are Mozart’s Overture to “Don Giovanni,” Frederick Delius’s “Summer Night on the River” and Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 3 in D, D. 200.
“¢ 8 p.m. Sunday, June 17, at Qualcomm Hall, a chamber ensemble performs Mozart’s Flute Quartet No. 1 in D, K. 285 and Divertimento in F, K. 522 (“A Musical Joke”), plus Felix Mendelssohn’s Octet for Strings in E flat, Opus 20.
These two concerts feature not-to be-missed pre-concert lectures by the knowledgeable and articulate Stanley Walens.
For information on additional concerts and tickets, visit www.mainlymozart.org or call (619) 239-0100.