Barry Lewis
Ancora String Quartet
You could call it a classical convergence. Or a head-on collision: Two extraordinary classical ensembles, Ancora String Quartet and con vivo!, both performed on Saturday, May 21.
Fortunately for this review, both ensembles previewed their concerts at the Capitol Lakes Retirement Center, where I was lucky enough to catch Ancora’s program in advance of their concert at First Unitarian Society.
The Ancora players offered two large works and two small ones, played with their usual vigor and enthusiasm. Franz Schubert’s Quartet in A minor is often called the “Rosamunde” for its use of an earlier theater melody of his in the variations movement. It is a serious work, but the group invested it with particular strength and power. The other larger work was Mozart’s Quartet in C, known as the “Dissonance” Quartet for some unsettling harmonic touches at the outset. Here, the players stressed more polished and refined qualities.
The two shorter pieces were a pretty “Romance in G minor” by a young Arthur Sullivan (yes, of Gilbert & Sullivan) and a “mystery” item, which the audience was invited to identify. (It was, in fact, a stripped-down movement from Handel’s “Water Music”.)
con vivo!
The program of con vivo! at First Congregational Church offered several novelties. Carl Nielsen composed his “Serenata in vano” for clarinet, bassoon, horn, cello and double bass. The musicians portray country musicians hired to serenade their employer’s lady-love. They play a preliminary address, and then a longingly beautiful melody, but all without response (or “in vain”), so they march off to the nearest pub. Utterly delicious music.
Max Reger’s “Lyrisches Andante” is his 1898 arrangement for strings for a vocal Liebestraum (love dream). As played by a string quintet (with bass), it projects Late-Romantic lushness, despite its brevity.
Antonin Dvorak’s “Bagatelles,” Op. 47, for two violins, cello and harmonium, is a set of five short movements, in folksy style, meant as “house music,” to be played by friends in a parlor setting. Its cornerstone is the modest harmonium, a soft miniature pedal-organ.
Unfortunately, the ensemble substituted the church’s organ for an actual harmonium, which was simply too overwhelming, almost swallowing up the strings. (In the Thursday evening performance, the replacement instrument was a piano, which totally wrecked the texture, colors and character of the set.) This delightful music deserves to be heard; but if you don’t have a harmonium, don’t fool around with it.
All of the foregoing are intimate chamber pieces, not really suited for a large and acoustically challenged hall. But the closer was more suitable: Beethoven’s youthful chamber hit, his Septet in E-flat, Op. 20, for clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello and bass. This pieces shows the young genius flexing his muscles and ingenuity in 1800, and con vivo! players dug into the kaleidoscopic score with relish.
