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Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg leads a night of serenades at Chamber Music Northwest, July 15, 2013.
(Jim Leisy)
Serenades aren't meant to be intense. They're supposed to be the kind of little night music of which Mozart's "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" is the sparkling exemplar. So a couple of names on
's Monday night serenade program at Kaul Auditorium seemed out of place.
The first was Beethoven, the iconically intense composer whose uncharacteristically light Op. 25 Serenade for Flute, Violin and Viola combined garden-party glibness with occasionally vehement exchanges of terse motives and arpeggios. Flutist Tara Helen O'Connor, violinist Todd Phillips and violist Daniel Phillips (violinists of the Orion String Quartet) made serious play of it, with such energy that boisterous applause erupted after the fifth-movement them and variations, and they had to remind the audience that there were two movements left.
Chamber Music Northwest 2013
When:
continues through July 28
Where:
Various locations, including Kaul Auditorium, Reed College, 3203 S.E. Woodstock Blvd. and Catlin Gabel School, 8825 S.W. Barnes Road
Tickets:
$25-$50, students $15; 503-294-6400 or cmnw.org
The second was Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, the famously fiery violinist and frequent guest of the Oregon Symphony in the James DePreist years, whose mere presence on stage, high-strung and electric, signals that something dramatic and potentially alarming is about to happen. In violist Ida Kavafian and cellist Sophie Shao she had ideal partners for Ernst von Dohnányi's Op. 10 Serenade; the three spring-loaded bow arms bit into attacks, leaned into rustic folk harmonies, sang the Romanza with soul and tripped nimbly through the Scherzo.
After intermission came the main event, Tchaikovsky's well-loved C Major Serenade for Strings, which gets played frequently but seldom like this, with a dream-team chamber orchestra. Salerno-Sonnenberg and the Emerson Quartet's Philip Setzer led an ensemble consisting of the Miró and Dover String Quartets, with Kavafian, Shao, bassist Curtis Daily and the Tokyo String Quartet's Martin Beaver.
Even the rests crackled in their high-tension reading, with sweeping phrasing, dancing energy and lush sound. The low strings were gorgeous in the third-movement Élégie. The ensemble played to Kaul's acoustic strengths, with warm, bouncing low notes (Daily's bass boomed as though he were connected to a 200-watt subwoofer planted in the middle of the stage), though they could have used an extra second violin and viola to enrich the middle voices. Sure, you've heard Tchaikovsky's Serenade a hundred times. This was the performance to make you fall in love with it all over again.
-- James McQuillen: jbmcquillen@icloud.com