Quintets by Nielsen and Schubert on chamber series

By Peter Alexander July 17 at 12:15 a.m.

Last night’s chamber music concert at the Colorado Music Festival (July 16) offered the kind of program that makes the festival such a valuable cultural asset.

The program comprised two quintets, both treasures of the chamber repertoire, one of them a rarity in concert, the other a deeply loved and profound gem. The first was the Quintet for Winds by the Danish composer Carl Nielsen, the other the Quintet in C major for strings by Schubert. The opportunity to hear both on the same program is most unusual. It is what CMF, with its deep roster of top professional players, can offer its audiences that few other venues can match.

Nielsen’s Wind Quintet is a quirky and delicious piece that is seldom heard in concert. Indeed, one of the joys of the concert was hearing a piece live that is rarely found outside recordings, and it is a testament to the quality of the players from the CMF Orchestra that a genuinely tricky piece seemed, not quite easy but comfortable to play. As an amateur clarinetist I was blown away by Louis DeMartino’s rich, warm clarinet sound, but the other players—Vivian Cumplido Wilson, flute; Zac Hammond, oboe and English horn; Wenmin Zhang, bassoon; and Roy Femenella, horn—were also consistently terrific.

The performance was marked by impeccable precision within the ensemble. The give and take between the parts, within a changeable texture marked by frequent imitation between instruments, was handled brilliantly. Such a level of ensemble is not easily reached with an informal group assembled for a single concert.

One of the challenges of the wind quintet genre is finding the right balance with five very different instruments. Matching a flute with a horn, or a clarinet with an oboe, requires careful listening, and it is a challenge that the CMF players consistently overcame. Not once did I hear a player covered, or obscured by a different tone quality.

String players face a different challenge, especially when they have a limited time to form an ensemble. While they can match each others’ sounds more easily than the winds, and thereby create a unified tone quality, much like an organ, within that harmonized sound small deviations of style become more perceptible. Indeed, there are elements of style that can only be polished when players have known each other over time. (Boulder audiences know this quality from the resident Takács Quartet, who will be featured on Sunday’s CMF Orchestra concert; see the CMF calendar for details and tickets.) 

There were occasional smudged passages, and moments of interpretive uncertainty in last night’s Schubert, both signs of a temporary ensemble. Likewise, the dance-like third movement seemed briefly to be pulling ever so slightly apart, and the thick chords at the movement’s opening were not always ideally balanced.

But it is the positive side of the ledger that dominated. The long slow crescendo at the start of the slow movement built beautifully, and the Finale had great unity of ensemble and well executed group rubato, creating a deeply expressive musical flow and a strong ending. The individual players—Kevin Lin and Kate Arndt, violin; DJ Cheek, viola; Austin Huntington and Britton Riley, cello—all performed beautifully, and the audience showed appreciation with a standing ovation at concert’s end.

Finally, I have to note that the Chautauqua Auditorium was well under half full. The audience, while appreciative, was far less than the delightful and fulfilling program deserved. Do yourself a favor: look up the chamber concerts on the CMF calendar. You will find rare and rich rewards among them.