Bachtrack - July 14 2019
“Brahms unleashed in South Pasadena”
While waiting for the sixth installment of the Summer of Brahms Chamber Music Festival to get under way, I discovered more than a half dozen of my neighbors just in my vicinity who had been to all the concerts so far. When I told them I had only heard the opening concert they generously filled me in, and told me how impressed they had been by the great variety of music Brahms wrote for so many different chamber music configurations. The sixth program in the eight-concert festival featured the composer in four configurations and was impressive in many respects.
Rafael Rishik, second violin of the New Hollywood String Quartet, played the orphaned, awkwardly named Sonatensatz with old-fashioned, heart melting notions of portamento and luscious vibrato; Robert Thies played with similarly exuberant and poetical imagination.
Paul Watkins, cellist of the Emerson Quartet, played Brahms' relentlessly dour yet volcanic first Cello Sonata as if he had been unleashed from his lowly ensemble duties, as if he subscribed to the old adage, "What happens in South Pasadena stays in South Pasadena".
When Watkins sits down and sticks his endpin into the floor, he embraces his cello the way a bear embraces a feast and plays his heart out on each big tune, and in much else of what goes on besides. And while he exulted in the kind of dominant sound and passion that would be out of place for most of his quartet playing, he still showed by giving full value to every note and an unshakeable rhythmic sense why the Emerson chose him to succeed founding member David Finckel.
Pianist Rohan De Silva at first was too reticent but then began to feel more comfortable and to lend a more yielding, velvet hand. The performance was enthusiastic, with no time for lyrical dalliance in the second movement Trio, and they dispatched the thorny last movement by totally sorting out the avalanche of fugal lines and putting them together in the cumulative way that Brahms knew would knock audiences out. Which Watkins and De Silva did. '
In the Piano Trio no. 2 in C major, Cho-Liang Lin brought a gentler touch to Watkins and Thies. The music moved more quickly than the Sonata, and was musically more decisive, Cho-Liang Lin's honey-colored tone and sculpted phrasing taming to some extent the glorious outpourings of Watkins and Thies.
After a leisurely intermission Los Angeles Philharmonic concertmaster Martin Chalifour led a turbo-charged performance of the G major Quintet. Cellist Andrew Shulman, principal of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, took on the swashbuckling, string-crossing, octave-jumping opening solo with the voluptuous confidence that every cellist invests in music they believe was written personally for them. Watched over by Chalifour, the musical voyage was impetuous and passionate, even occasionally serene, as in the first movement's viola duets and Chalifour's touching response.
After they had all tumbled deliriously to the end, if they had played one of Brahms' Hungarian Dances as an encore, they would have had the audience dancing in the aisles.