By Lyn Bronson
When Chamber Music Monterey Bay (CMMB), or as it was originally known: “The Chamber Music Society of the Monterey Peninsula,” first started in Carmel forty-three years ago, the season’s programs were fairly predictable. There would be during the season several programs consisting exclusively of string quartets and perhaps one program with a string ensemble that included piano. The rationale behind this was that piano trios and piano quartets were considered more the provenance of amateur Haus-Musik, while the string quartet was for the true chamber music “connoisseur.” Not everyone agreed with this assessment, and a famous violist, who was a member of the Kolisch Quartet, once defined a string quartet “as four players on stage having a wonderful time, with the audience bored out of their minds.”
Well, as someone once said, “Many a truth is spoken in jest,” and, in truth, a performance of a string quartet is often more involving for the participants than for the audience. However, it wasn’t merely a form of snobbish elitism that prompted the formation of the original “Chamber Music Society of the Monterey Peninsula.” Although the audience in those early years was very small (less than 200 people), probably half the audience consisted of amateur musicians in our community who were themselves involved on a regular basis playing ensemble music in their homes. These were the people who knew every note of the Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven quartets that formed the core of the programs presented during the season on the stage of Carmel’s Sunset Center.
As we all know, audiences have changed, school music programs have diminished to the point of extinction, fewer people (except in the Asian community) are taking private music lessons, and more people are enjoying pre-recorded music on CD then are exploring or performing it themselves.
The natural consequence of all this is that concert programs have had to become a lot less serious and a lot more audience friendly than they used to be. Programs used to be heavier. It was like going to church, for you were there to worship at the altar of the great masters, and also to be enlightened by hearing music from the new high priests, whose music was difficult, but deemed good for you.
CMMB’s season’s programs have during the past decade turned out to be much more fun than they used to be. For example, in its present season only two of the five programs are devoted exclusively to the string quartet, while two include piano and one features the distinguished clarinetist Richard Stoltzman.
This brings us to this evening’s program, presented by the nine-woman string and piano ensemble from Canada, La Pietà , which gave us such an enjoyable program several years ago on Halloween. Last night’s program was intelligently conceived, brilliantly performed, and it was highly entertaining — an unbeatable combination. The players, led by violinist and concertmaster le Dubeau, are fine young musicians who brought much skill, refinement and spirit to their performances. At various times during the evening we had ample opportunities to hear the various players in brief solos, and there was some knockout playing.
Dubeau promised us an evening resembling a musical travelogue representing music from many varied cultures, and from the first notes of the beginning work on the program, Polka, by Alfred Schnittke, we knew we were in for an interesting evening. This piece has an infectious charm (and a nice Gypsy feeling) that took me completely by surprise — I didn’t know a Polka could be this much fun. There were two arrangements of film scores by Philip Glass, the first one, Overture to “The Beauty and the Beast,” being considerably more effective than the second one from the film “The Hours” After a less than satisfying Danses Populaires Roumaines by Bartok (where it was the arrangement, not the performance, that seemed a bit flat) we heard a terrific performance of two selections from De Falla’s El Amor Brujo in which that old chestnut, the “Ritual Fire Dance” turned out sounding fantastic and not at all the way it did as a hackneyed piano encore from the 1940s in the hands of Artur Rubinstein or Oscar Levant.
The most surprising work on the program was the melancholy Tango by Piazzolla that built considerable tension and anguish in its opening melody over a sustained ostinato pattern — at one point the ostinato pattern switched from bass and piano to the strings with the piano declaiming the melody. When the Tango finally emerged it became a crazy fugue. I have to admit that if I had heard this piece without knowing its composer, I might not have guessed Piazzolla.
After intermission the most interesting works were the last three by Lorraine Desmarais, Christos Hatzis and Isaak Dunayevsky. In the Desmarais, Dubeau informed us that the composer was inspired by the number “thirteen†and that there were thirteen variations. The opening theme was a beautiful violin solo by Dubeau, rather in the style of a movement from a Bach unaccompanied suite. Each succeeding variation was a total contrast of various styles ending with a tango (more like Piazzolla than Piazzolla himself) and a great jazz variation. This was a piece that left you wanting more. The following work by Christos Hatsis (like the Desmarais piece it was commissioned by La Pietà ) was the last movement of the suite “Arabesque” called “Gypsy Heart.” If you were expecting sobbing violins over cimbalom effects on the piano, you were to be disappointed, for this work developed a quiet mysterious mood, and it took a while before the ensemble erupted into a wild “Hora Staccato”- like perpetual motion to its exhilarating climax.
The program ended with Isaak Dunayevsky’s richly scored “Circus Fantasy,” a period-piece Soviet film score from the early 1930s, that had some lovely nostalgia reminding us of dance tunes from the 1920s (although every dance band at the time would have included a banjo, which I am just as glad was conspicuously missing). There were some nice touches added with the ensemble once snapping their fingers, lightly stamping their feet and adding a vocalise-like sing-along at the end.
An enthusiastic audience was rewarded with two encores: tunes from Offenbach’s Gaiete Parisienne, and two melodies by Ennio Moricone.
End
