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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
July 6, 2003
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By Scott MacClelland
A spirited and vibrant reading of Schumann's Piano Quartet in E flat punctuated the opening faculty recital Sunday night at California Summer Music, the camp for advanced young students held each summer in Pebble Beach. With a widely-experienced faculty and associates of the San Francisco Conservatory, the camp has just entered its ninth summer season on the sylvan campus of Robert Louis Stevenson, a private college-prep high school, itself having just celebrated a fiftieth anniversary. CSM music director, cellist Irene Sharp, spoke to the audience prior to the Schumann, asking for donations and added support, some of which has indeed come from a handful of socially prominent Monterey Peninsula residents.
An accomplished singer and chamber musician, pianist Kathryn Brown supported string players Wendy Sharp, Basil Vendryes and Scott Kluksdahl with authority and flair, somehow scaling her dynamics to their voices in the acoustically efficient Keck Auditorium even with the Yamaha grand's lid full up. At no time were the strings overwhelmed by Brown's sensitive ensemble work and generous sonority. While Brown created the illusion that she was following her colleagues' lead, in fact she was as tightly glued to them as they were to one another. Kluksdahl's switch to a second cello, tuned to accommodate the low B flat pedal tone in the third movement, perturbed the performance not in the least. The melting melody that opened the movement was but one highlight of a recording-quality performance.
The results were more muted in Sharp's own reading of Rachmaninoff's Cello Sonata in G Minor, a collaboration with pianist Lori Lack heard during the evening's first half. Sharp's performance wanted more muscle, even aggression, against Lack's fistful of notes, played with the piano at half lid. The cellist is certainly well acquainted with the piece and made a respectful account of it. But despite its composer's well-known technical fingerprints, the piece stumbles through a disconnected sequence of misplaced moods and ideas. The first movement struggles mightily to break out; the third movement seeks in vain to soar; the finale lapses into cloying movie banality. Only the second movement, a scherzando, enjoys the kind of integrity found in Rachmaninoff's best music: an A-B-A whose lyrical B section got the most persuasive of Sharp's soulful argument, it demonstrated that the cello part needs exceptional force of personality to save this piece from itself.
Robin Sharp opened the program with the challenging Sonata for Violin Solo by Robert Kurka, best known for his satiric opera The Good Soldier Schweik (just now starting a month-long revival at Glimmerglass Opera in upstate New York.) Kurka, who died of leukemia in his mid-30s, dedicated the three-movement sonata to his wife May, who was present for the reading. President of the CMS executive board, May Kurka has been a mainstay of CMS from the start, fielding all manner of administrative and promotion requirements. The piece itself is spiky with originality and mastery of classical forms. It sings, dances, reflects and rhapsodizes, and gains counterpoint through liberal use of double-stops. Its final movement is given to a complex set of variations. Robin Sharp negotiated its sometimes-tortuous path with focus, clarity and heartfelt dedication. CMS runs through July 27, with regular free performances including a faculty and student concert of works by Chen Yi with the composer in residence, July 18. For more information: csm@csmusic.org.
(Scott MacClelland, since 1978, has written music criticism and journalism for all the major newspapers on the Monterey Peninsula, and for the Metro papers in Santa Cruz and San Jose. During the same period, he has taught music history for Monterey Peninsula College.)
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