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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
November 6, 2003
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By Michelle Dulak
Last Thursday's recital at the San Francisco Conservatory might have ended in what looked like a
belated Halloween prank, but the enchantments earlier in the program were of a subtler nature.
Gilbert Kalish was the guest artist, and his incisive pianism ran through the whole program.
The opening piece was Debussy's Violin Sonata, with Ian Swensen, playing from memory. I don't
think I've ever heard a more impetuous, more volatile account of the piece. Swensen was ferocious
where the score demanded virtuosity (the sextuplets in the finale were blindingly fast and
frighteningly articulate), but languid and almost decadent elsewhere. And yet the two modes traded
places practically every few bars. And Swensen's extravagance might have seemed not to go well
with Kalish's almost exaggerated precision of articulation; but it did.
Next on the program was what is called the "Little" A-Major Concerto of Mozart — K. 414, one
of a set of three concerti that Mozart designed to be playable with or without winds. On Thursday
the team was a string quintet: three faculty (Swensen, cellist Jean-Michel Fonteneau, and bassist
Stephen Tramontozzi) and two students (Alan Molina, violin, and Michi Aceret, viola).
Kalish's Mozart struck me as more efficient than interesting; but no one could say that of the accompanying quintet. Aceret is the sort of player who attracts notice simply by doing ordinary tasks extraordinarily well. There's a three-note viola figure in the first movement of the Mozart that comes back repeatedly. Aceret played that not only beautifully but seductively. Then there was Fonteneau, of course; alert as ever, reveling in the interplay of the parts as ever. Not that he had many opportunities in that concerto, but he'd take them where he found them. The intermission was unusually long, and afterwards we discovered why. The players who were coming back after the first half were, er, transformed. Mr. Fonteneau, for example, had a dot of red paint on his nose, gigantic green "eyebrows" (outlined in black) painted above the natural ones, and either a "carrot-top" wig or hair dye. The brilliant 16-year-old clarinetist Teddy Abrams, next to him, had some sort of glitter formula in his hair, and weird green spikes radiating from his eyes over his cheeks. Susan Narucki, who took on the Sprechstimme role in Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire, was dressed merely as a chanteuse — black dress, vast ruffled collar, bright lipstick — and why not? That's what Pierrot was for; and God knows Narucki did it brilliantly. She crept round the stage, sometimes draping herself over one player's chair or another — as over flutist Jenny Robinson's chair for "Der kranke Mond" (The sick Moon), where the flute was her only accompaniment. At other times she knelt in front of the whole ensemble. She hit the precise balance between speech and song, and the performance was frighteningly good. Of the accompanying players I can say nothing finer than that the two winds and the violist — all students (and one a high school student at that) held their own with their teachers and with the distinguished guest pianist and singer. (Though if I had to single out a highlight, it would be "Serenade," the grotesque number that mentions a viola but actually uses a cello, where Fonteneau played with perhaps more eloquence than the music deserved.)
(Michelle Dulak, editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, is a violinist and violist who has
written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and the
New York Times.)
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Susan Narucki
Gilbert Kalish