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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
July 11, 2004
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By Janos Gereben
A five-year-old music festival is just a toddler, trying, experimenting, falling down a lot. Sonoma's Green Music Festival, now its fifth season, is different. It has grown up in a hurry, to become a strong, handsome, impressive, self-assured young adult.
In the benign dry heat, the Sonoma State University campus is a most pleasant venue. For the first time, the festival is providing ambiance galore, with free food and wine (Sonoma's Kendall-Jackson, no less) under a big white tent. The atmosphere is similar to Aspen's or some old, established summer music festivals' — minus high prices and any pretension.
The feel of the place may remind one of many mellow "music" festivals around the country, where pop or popsified "classics" play in the background, but at the Green Festival, Jeffrey Kahane's programming is anything but that. Without apologies in this "rural setting," the festival director serves up Ravel, Shostakovich, Fauré, Saint-Sa”ns, Schubert, and even — yikes! — contemporary chamber music.
Take the Sunday concert: it opened with a breathtaking performance by the violinist Chee-Yun of Kevin Puts' Arches, a brilliant new work written for her by the former California Symphony composer-in-residence. A virtuoso piece, with substance, Arches is a series of caprices and arias for solo violin, invoking Bach and Paganini, but an original work.
Chee-Yun, who has risen steadily in recent years to the top rank among violinists, played the devilishly difficult piece (which she asked the composer to make "challenging") with effortless grace. You don't get to see such work being "tossed off" like this while, at the same time, experiencing the performer's total dedication to the music. From its current residence at Stanford came the St. Lawrence String Quartet — the amazing violinists Geoff Nuttall and Barry Shiffman; the shy, self-effacing but highly effective violist Lesley Robertson; and the quartet's new, impressive cellist, Chris Costanza — to perform the relatively seldom-heard Dvorák String Quartet in C Major No. 11. Except for the somewhat fragmented Scherzo (the music, rather than the musicians at fault), the performance was joyous and memorable, well-deserving of the standing ovation (which seems to be an unvarying habit in the Evert B. Person Theater). From the opening Allegro on, the sound was warm, passionately romantic, varied in the second movement by playfulness and elegance, later Nuttall becoming airborne repeatedly in the Finale, played with maximum "vivace," and yet everything balanced and true, nothing for show, everything for the sake of the music. As Kahane joined the St. Lawrence in the second half of the concert, for Brahms' Piano Quintet in F minor, I fully expected a crowning finale to an already marvelous afternoon, but it was not to be, not to my ears. As to most of the others, the standing ovation after the Brahms was louder and longer than the previous audience celebrations. I can see why. Very big, very impassioned, very loud, the work sounded Brahms-as-Wagner in a Solti interpretation... and that's just a bit too much.
The work's opening was quite beautiful, as if a sequel to that "perfect" Dvorák, but soon "amplification" kicked in. The Andante was simply overblown but settled down to a fine blending of the strings with Kahane's bright piano. The Scherzo and — especially — the Finale brought way too much visible and audible effort to a venue where nothing of the kind had been evident in either Chee-Yun's performance or the St. Lawrence's Dvorák. The high point of a post-concert audience discussion with Kahane and the quartet came in response to a question whether the foursome have their arguments and disagreements. "We disagree on everything," Costanza began to reply when interrupted by Nuttall's sharp "NO, WE DON'T!" Ah, the fun of summer concerts... For information about the rest of the festival, see http://www.greenmusicfestival.org.
(Janos Gereben, a regular contributor to www.sfcv.org, is arts editor of the Post
Newspaper Group. His e-mail address is janosg@gmail.com)
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