Music@Menlo releases new chamber concerts

The latest two Explorers Series concerts show the variety of experiences available to auditors. The Jan. 24 release was a recital featuring violinist Kristin Lee and pianist Orion Weiss in 1920s-30s music by Maurice Ravel and George Gershwin. The two composers knew each other and were mutually admiring. In conversations before each work, Lee and Weiss discussed what mutual influences the two composers might have had — or maybe not, since most of the music played dated from before they met.

Lee and Weiss presented Ravel as a musical sponge who was happy to pick up and express any style he came across. Thus they played Ravel’s Spanish-influenced “Vocalise-etude” and his Hungarian-style “Tzigane” as well as his jazz-inflected Violin Sonata No. 2. Even the Sonata was more French modernism than anything jazzy, except for the middle movement, which is a stealthy and fetching “marching” blues. Lee played this with gently bent notes.

Gershwin didn’t write music for violin and piano, so the musicians offered virtuoso violinist Jascha Heifetz’s concert arrangements of the Piano Prelude No. 1 and five songs from the opera “Porgy and Bess, full of jazz vocal inflections, double-stops and virtuoso display.

The performers played all this with crisp precision, notable for the tightness of Lee’s trills and for Weiss’ spiky attacks on the piano. This style was reinforced by the dry, unresonant sound in what appeared to be somebody’s living room and close-up, tight camera work on the video.

The Feb. 14 concert, featuring the Emerson String Quartet, was entirely different. The major work on the program, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Op. 132 Quartet, is one of his last compositions, a massive work of solemn atmosphere. Its central slow movement was written as a thanksgiving for the composer’s recovery from illness. In a half-hour video interview with Menlo’s Patrick Castillo preceding the concert, the musicians emphasized the movement’s suitability as healing music during the pandemic. Separated from the world by his deafness as listeners now are by isolation, Beethoven has meaning for us, the Emerson players believe.

Suitably, then, they gave a serious and often impassioned performance, aided by the deeply echoing acoustics of a recital hall at Stony Brook University where they are quartet in residence. Lawrence Dutton’s viola and Paul Watkins’ cello sounded dark and grounded in contrast to the lighter, floating sound of Philip Setzer and Eugene Drucker on violins. Passages of two against two were conspicuous.

While the song of thanksgiving was the extended still moment lying at the heart of the quartet, I was equally struck in this performance by the gentle grace of the preceding minuet. The exchange of peacefully falling phrases between Dutton on viola and Setzer on first violin in the Allemande trio section gave an elegant contrast.

Equally notable was how the minuet’s repeating three-note phrases echoed similar phrasing in the preceding work, Henry Purcell’s Chacony in G Minor. This was played, with Drucker in the first violin chair, in an arrangement by Benjamin Britten, adding dynamics and rhythmic variations that give emotional thickness to the work and remove it from the “flat” Baroque-style often heard.

While less flashy than the Ravel-Gershwin program, this was a small epic of an emotionally moving concert.

Two more concerts await subscribers to the Explorers Series. On March 14, Wu Han and Gilles Vonsattel will play two- and four-hand piano music by French composers both male and female. On May 16, the exciting Calidore String Quartet will play music by Franz Schubert and Samuel Barber, potentially a match for the Emerson concert in solemn intensity.

Also on the Menlo online schedule is a benefit concert by young musicians from its Chamber Music Institute, including pieces they’ve enlivened the summer music festivals with. That’s on April 18. Info and tickets on all of these is at musicatmenlo.org.