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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
November 23, 2003
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By Heuwell Tircuit
The Noe Valley Chamber Music Series produced an embarrassment of musical riches Sunday afternoon with a program entitled “Good Friends, Good Music.” That turned out to be too modest a name. Good friends they may be, but the program consisted of not merely “good,” but great music in performances which would do honor to Europe's finest summer festivals.
The concert opened with Mozart's String Quintet in G Minor, K.516, a small shift from the previously announced C Major String Quintet, K. 515. That was followed by another major masterpiece: Brahms' String Sextet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 36, and after intermission the Schumann Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 44. Performers included violinists Bettina Mussumeli and Katherine Kyme; violists Jodi Levitz and David Daniel Bowes; cellists Joanna Blendulf and Tanya Tomkins, plus pianist Eric Zivian in the Schumann.
In its way this was chamber music as it was intended to be, friends getting together to play for friends in informal surroundings. Presented in the second floor hall of the Noe Valley Ministry — the smallish room seats only a few hundred — the overflow crowd extended into the lobby and, I was told, the stairwell. So, clearly, after 11 years these Noe Valley chamber concerts have gathered a wide and loyal audience.
Naturally, there's a catch. The performers are from the cream of locally available musicians, all with backgrounds in important posts. Sunday's group included current members of Philharmonia Baroque and alumni of the San Francisco Opera as well as a dozen major European and American ensembles and opera houses. One is on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory.
Violinist Mussumeli, Juilliard and Oxford trained, had been co-concertmaster of I Solisti Veneti and guest concertmaster in assorted Italian opera houses — Venice, Bologna, et al. Cellist Tomkins, trained at the Hague, was founder of Trio d'Amsterdam, and had played in La Petite Bande, the Orchestre des Champs-Elysées, Netherlands Bach Society, and so on. Well, you get the idea. All these musicians have similar backgrounds, and most have experience in performance as colleagues. Levitz, for instance, sitting across from Mussemeli, was solo violist of I Solisti Veneti for 12 years before coming here to teach at the San Francisco Conservatory — the point being that such musicians know each other's musicianship well enough to blend in flawlessly, and with seemingly little effort. The performance of the Mozart Quintet was beyond the slightest reproach. Intonation, balances, tempo selection, tasteful luxury of phrasing and refined articulation were everywhere apparent. The same proved the case with the Schumann performance, highlighted by pianist Zivian's sturdy and subtly varied timbres. Only he suffers a bit from a Glenn Gould syndrome — too much choreographic waving of the hands, swaying and swooning. Musicians engaging in mock performance orgasms are as distracting to me as cell phones going off. Beyond that, it vulgarizes.
Brahms' Second Sextet is always a great crowd pleaser. It brims with vitality and high spirits as if it were always about to break into a string of Hungarian dances — and sometime does! The warmth of melodic charm and the infectious dance passages, like the stomping center of the scherzo, almost qualify the Sextet as his third Serenade, right up there with his Op. 11 for orchestra, and Op. 16 for chamber orchestra. The performance was quite good, only not quite as polished as the Mozart and Schumann. Little bits of scrappy intonation proved bothersome in the first two movements, although that was never so overt as to bother the average listener. Once it was over, the applause rolled like thunder through the hall. That was topped by the final ovation, which included quite a lot of cheering. The concert deserved as much: Good friends, Masterful music, Thrilling performances. The series continues on December 7, Pearl Harbor Day, with a program titled “American Reflections.”
(Heuwell Tircuit, composer, performer and writer, was chief writer for Gramophone Japan and for 21 years a music reviewer for the SF Chronicle, previously for the Chicago American and Asahi Evening News.)
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