San Francisco Classical Voice

Mixed chamber ensembles are strange creatures. More often than not, there is no music that the assorted instruments can play as a group. They gather, instead, in twos and threes and fours to play the music they find in various combinations. As a result, they exist only perilously as organizations, relying on the mutual goodwill of a few musicians to keep together. I am not sure what players really constitute the "Foxglove Ensemble," but I hope they stay together as long as they can, for their recital Friday night at Old First Church featured a level of chamber playing we experience too seldom.

Friday's concert involved three strings (Sara Usher, Elizabeth Prior Runnicles, and Thalia Moore), a pianist (Ellen Wasserman), and a horn (Robert Ward), featured in two of the pieces. In introducing one of these, a quartet for horn and string trio by Frederic Duvernoy, Ward identified the composer as the solo horn of the Paris Opéra for a long tenure beginning in 1799. Duvernoy became such an audience draw that placards for new opera productions (even for the premiere of Spontini's "La Vestale") assured patrons, in larger type than was used for the singing cast, that "Duvernoy will be playing the horn solos."

One would expect Duvernoy's quartet to contain spectacular horn solos, and it does. But one would not necessarily expect a piece of this level of craft, or this severity of tone. The piece is not in any of the major modes beloved of horn composers, but actually in D minor (with a brief, hymn-like D-major slow movement). The motivic language is something like earlyish Haydn or Boccherini in their minor-mode moods, vehement and fretful.

Though the piece is not a concerto or a display piece, the horn takes the lead much of the time. Ward graciously yielded center stage to his colleagues when they had solo turns. He played wonderfully, with a warm and mellow tone (a few over-prominent pedal tones apart) that blended beautifully with the strings. And the strings were wonderful themselves. Sara Usher, the violinist, stood out in particular, with her immaculate technique and her stylish sense of gesture.

Ward reappeared a bit later on to play a Concertino for horn and piano by the Dutch composer Jan Koetsier. Born in 1911, Koetsier had a significant orchestral conducting career, but as a composer seems to have concentrated mainly on music for brass. This Concertino dates from the 1970s, but only a few bumptious rhythmic and harmonic gestures (à la Françaix) betray what is in fact an honest-to-God late-19th-century virtuoso violin piece, somehow transmogrified for horn. The Vieuxtemps of the horn, in fact. Nimbleness and delicacy are not the usual hornist's prime stock in trade, but Ward gave an astonishing performance, noble in the cantabile sections and devastatingly agile in the fioriture. Ellen Wasserman did what she could with a piano part that sounded suspiciously like an orchestral reduction. (It was; the piece, as I later found out, is originally for horn and string orchestra.)

The fine string playing in the Duvernoy whetted my appetite for the Dohnanyi Serenade for string trio, Op. 10, which followed next on the program and was even more of a treat than I had anticipated.

The Foxglove strings are all strong and distinctive players. Sara Usher, the violinist, stands out immediately for her technical command and her sheer sense of style. She is a terrific violinist, but Elizabeth Prior Runnicles, the violist, is something rarer--a terrific violist. Runnicles goes instinctively for the peculiar, plangent possibilities of her instrument and brings them out. It's a strange experience to be sitting at a recital and mentally yelling "Go! Go!," like a fan at a football game, but then I'm a violist myself. We are, ultimately, rather strange people.

Usher and Runnicles have more or less the same kind of sound--fast, rather wide vibrato, heavily varied and inflected. Thalia Moore, the cellist, is a different sort of player, with a much tighter vibrato and a much denser sound, but the three of them did an extraordinary job working together in the "Serenade." Nowhere in the five-movement piece was there any sense of friction among the players' styles, and the performance was full of sensuous delights, from Usher's high-on-the-G-string account of the first movement's second theme to Runnicles' gorgeous opening of the second movement, to the trio's hushed introduction of the fourth-movement variations. Only the devilishly chromatic scherzo in the middle seemed to need an extra sting in the articulation.

If Brahms' C-minor piano quartet, Op. 60, seemed an anticlimax at the end of the program, it may have been because the players (Wasserman, Usher, Runnicles, Moore) were reluctant to risk making an ugly sound. Everything quiet in the piece was marvelous (I am compelled to single out Thalia Moore's exquisite opening solo in the slow movement). It was the fortissimos that didn't quite work, as if the danger of clanging or banging or scraping or scratching was enough to scare the players off from the last degree of effort, the last bit of energy, at the pivotal points. Granted, this is uncommonly strenuous music, even for Brahms, and taking every marked fortissimo literally is an invitation to mayhem. But somewhere in this quartet the players ought to reach their limits--ought to note them, then go beyond--and they didn't. Given the expressive range the strings went for in the Dohnanyi, a real limit-exceeding performance of the Brahms from the Foxglove Ensemble would've been something to hear. I look forward to it.

(Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.)

©2000 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved