It was Robert Schumann, speaking of string quartets, who advised players to aim for “a conversational tone in which everyone has something to say.” The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble clearly had those words in mind Thursday night at Mill Valley’s 142 Throckmorton Theatre, as they performed the composer’s Quartet in E-flat Major for Piano and Strings, Op. 47.
Schumann’s vivacious chamber work was the highlight of “Conversation Pieces,” the latest program by the San Francisco-based group under the direction of violinist Anna Presler. But each piece on the program had plenty to say, and the Left Coast players made it all sound eloquent.
Thursday’s performance paired Schumann’s quartet with three contemporary works: Steven Snowden’s The Devil’s Nine Questions, Sandor Veress’ Memento for Viola and Double Bass, and Tom Johnson’s Failing: A Very Difficult Work for Double Bass. The program repeats Monday evening in San Francisco in the Green Room of the Veterans War Memorial Building.
Presler and company — Phyllis Kamrin (violin), Kurt Rohde (viola), Leighton Fong (cello), and Eric Zivian (piano) — made Schumann’s challenging quartet seem like easy work; of course, it helps to be able to anticipate your cohorts’ every move, and these players have had many years to develop a group dynamic, in Left Coast performances as well as in Bay Area ensembles such as the New Century Chamber Orchestra.
Still, it was exciting to hear just how elegantly the performance meshed from the start of Schumann’s lovely Sostenuto assai movement, emerging with crisp tone from the strings and expressive phrasing by Zivian.
Schumann, with a nod to Beethoven, reversed the usual order of the quartet’s second and third movements; the fleet Scherzo comes next, and the Left Coast players traversed it with the focused direction and collective energy of a small buzzing hive. The third movement, marked Andante cantabile, featured Fong, who imbued the cello’s arioso melody with a precise blend of purity and wistfulness.
In the opening fugue and subsequent outpouring of the finale, the players one again sounded keenly attuned. In a year that has seen dozens of performances marking the 200th anniversary of Schumann’s birth, this emerged as being among the most heartfelt.
In the first half, Snowden’s The Devil’s Nine Questions made its world premiere with a conversation of a different sort. The winner of this year’s Left Coast composition contest, the score, for piano and strings, is based on a folk tune depicting an encounter between the Devil and a maid. In his prefatory remarks, the composer said he found the tune on a recording by Max Hunter, who traveled through Missouri and Arkansas in the 1950s and 1960s with a reel-to-reel tape recorder, capturing traditional music in rural communities.
Snowden, who was raised in Missouri and is based in Austin, Texas, uses his source material effectively, introducing the tune in the beguiling first movement, driving it underground in the agitated, insinuating second, and returning to fragments of it in the chilly, light-refracting finale. The Left Coast ensemble, combining force with clarity, gave the score a compelling first reading.
The evening opened with the one-on-one conversation of Veress’ 1983 Memento. The work is a tightly scored, beautiful yet often harrowing duet for viola and double bass. Kamrin and bassist Michel Taddei gave it a gripping performance.
In between, Taddei assayed Johnson’s Failing, which asks the bassist to read aloud while playing. It’s a musical tongue-twister with a tricky score and text along the lines of Ken Nordine’s Word Jazz. Taddei managed both with a measure of charm. Yet, even with a compact running time of 11 minutes, the work came across like a long-winded party guest overstaying his welcome.