Review: International roster of classical musicians shine in second ChamberFest West

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            One year ago, ChamberFest West inaugurated its new summer chamber music festival with a series of concerts grandly entitled Big Bang. This explosive and auspicious beginning continued this year with a second season of ChamberFest West, this time entitled Resonance. While the title might suggest a certain modesty, the concerts were anything but modest. This second incarnation of the new festival demonstrated an impressive maturity beyond last year’s fine opening, evident in the imaginative programming and in the absolutely superlative performances.

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           Even the most musically discerning members of the audience made a point of stopping me during intermissions to rave about specific performers, works, and the programming that had impressed them.

          While the festival is modelled upon the Cleveland version of ChamberFest (also organized by the CPO concertmaster Diana Cohen and her pianist husband Roman Rabinovich and Cohen’s father, Franklin Cohen), the two festivals are entirely different in their programming and in most of the performers. Only the two main pianists constitute a significant overlap in the performers.

         Each of this year’s ChamberFest West’s five programs had a different title and focus, programs that combined new works with established, traditional masterpieces. New this year was the participation of soprano Susanna Phillips, a singer of remarkable talent and superb voice, whose singing gave a new dimension to the festival. Phillips was featured in a fine new set of songs specially composed for her by pianist/composer Michael Stephen Brown; elsewhere she sang music by Schubert, Respighi, and Korngold.

        This year’s festival had a Shakespearean tinge, evident a program entitled Dances with Shakespeare and in the final program Sunday evening labeled If Music Be the Food of Love. Beyond Shakespearean allusions, there were many subtle programming interconnections. These included such elements as a program based on variation techniques, a program that featured John Adam’s Shaker Loops, based in a different type of variation technique. This program also included ancient and modern harpsichord variations; and even the slow movement of the concluding Archduke Trio by Beethoven just happens to be a set of variations. Clearly, much thought and care went into the choice of the works performed.

 Instead of a single venue for the concerts, they were held in different performing spaces. I was able to attend the final two programs, held on the Jack Singer Concert Hall stage and the Bella Concert Hall of Mount Royal University respectively. But the venue that attracted the most attention was the Thursday concert held at The Bow. If this venue is included in next year’s festival, a full house can be expected.

  As performances, the two concerts I heard could hardly have been bettered. Each contained modern or older works followed by a major blockbuster that featured one of the two pianists. The Saturday concert, as mentioned above, started with rarely heard harpsichord music: William Byrd’s The Bells and Gyorgy Ligeti’s jazz inflected Hungarian Rock. While the harpsichord and piano are both keyboard instruments, it is a very different thing to play each instrument. But one had no sense in these performances that both Michael Stephen Brown and Roman Rabinovich are both at heart pianists, so idiomatic was the playing of the harpsichord.

            The title piece for this concert was Shaker Loops, one of John Adams’s best-known works, filled with complex textures and coinciding and non-coinciding rhythms, all in his patented minimalist style. Semi-soloistic in its writing, the piece benefitted greatly from the high performing level of each performer, the evident virtuosity of each player creating a vibrant buzz to the performance, representative, musically speaking, of the religious ecstasy of New England Shakers of the past.

            The final work on this program was Beethoven’s Archduke Trio, one of the composers most attractive chamber works and with a tremendously challenging part for the piano. Michael Stephen Brown, as a performing personality, has something of the concerto soloist manner about him, and he somewhat dominated the musical proceedings, at least in volume of sound. In the performance overall, however, the two string players, violinist Liza Ferschtman and cellist Jonathan Swensen were worthy partners, not only for their complete technical assurance but even more for the conviction they brought to every note they played. This was etched, muscular playing,the music building to an exuberant conclusion that brought the entire audience to its feet at the conclusion.

            The final program Sunday was no less thrilling. Susanna Phillips was splendid in the songs composed for her, her diction clear, and her voice beguiling at all times. Entitled Love’s Lives Lost, the songs are inspired by the love relationship of Clara and Robert Schumann, the eight songs a riff on Schumann’s own song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben. The attractive poetry by Evan Shinners is suffused with nostalgia in modern vein but is also witty in places, especially in the rhymed poem on Kalamazoo.      

            Michael Stephen, Brown, the composer and accompanist, provided sensitive accompaniments, some of them extended instrumental reflections on the texts in the manner of Schumann, if with harmonies that evoked the sound world of Ravel. Two mainstream works followed: Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet and Robert Schumann’s Quintet in E-flat major for piano and strings. Both were beautifully balanced, integrated performances, with a high degree of sophistication in performance from all performers.

            An impressive element of the festival overall was the cadre of players themselves: all have the ability of concerto soloists, but they also have extended experience with chamber music and are devoted to the idea of making music with others. The individual virtuosity of the players always serves this common musical purpose.

            This said, one could not help notice the leadership of Franklin Cohen in the Mozart quintet, a work he must have performed countless times and in which a certain autumnal quality needs to emerge. Stable and measured, but alive to nuance, this was the finest live performance I have heard of this great Mozartian work. Rabinovich was the pianist in the Schumann quintet that closed the festival in a superb account of this highly attractive piece.

            The special, inward, quality of the slow movement was moving, contrasting with the playful qualities of the sparklingly scherzo. A wonderful moment came in the first movement in where the soulful cello reaches for the top of a phrase only to pass it off to the viola which has to continue and complete what the cellist starts. Magical moments here.  Indeed, magical moments abounded in this performance, with Rabinovich’s remarkable virtuosity always serving the music, pushing it ever forward and providing the elan to the richly written string parts. Rarely has a chamber performance moved its audience so completely.

            As an event, this year’s ChamberFest West was of the highest international standard and will be hard to top. The only thing certain is that the artistic directors are going to do their best to try.

Note: A previous version of this review named violinist Liza Ferschtman. She was replaced by Amy Schwartz Moretti for this performance.