FESTIVAL PLAYERS AND STUMPF AND BRANCART
Music reviews: Weekend performances impress

Posted: Monday, July 1, 2013 12:00 am | Updated: 12:37 am, Mon Jul 1, 2013.
By Peter Jacobi H-T Reviewer | pjacobi@heraldt.com | 0 comments
The music flows on.
Friday evening in Auer Hall, the Festival Chamber Players offered a varied program of works by Brahms, Dvorak and two contemporary composers, the Canadian Gary Kulesha and Indiana University’s own, Don Freund.

For starters, the violin-piano duo of Gillham (David) and Iinuma (Chiharu) adroitly negotiated Brahms’ Scherzo in C Minor, WoO 2, a stimulating exercise that blends a lovely melodic theme with one that forced violinist Gillham to do some heated fiddling, a task he accomplished impressively.
For a closer, violinist Sarah Kapustin, violist Roeland Jagers, cellist Csaba Onczay and pianist Chih-Yi Chen performed the Dvorak Piano Quartet Number 2 in E-Flat Major, a work bursting with joy. It drips lyricism. It dances ecstatically. It embraces warmth. The musicians adopted its qualities unreservedly. Their reading was radiant and full-hearted. Special praise should go to Chen, whose specialty is accompanying, a talent she reveals frequently hereabouts, but who, on this occasion, took on the key role in this chamber collaboration and proved, as she has whenever given the opportunity, that she’s a superb pianist worthy of the brighter spotlight reserved for soloists; her pianism was masterful.
The music of Gary Kulesha was new to me, but the introspective “and dark time flowed by her like a river” struck an emotional chord. Written for piano and either violin, viola, or cello, the music, says the composer, is meant to reflect one’s moment of realization that precious time too quickly escapes us and there’s nothing we can do but accept it. The score veers, not always comfortably but mood-wise appropriately, between tonal and atonal, the serene and the agitated, all of which the Gillham-Iinoma Duo grasped and fully evoked.
Violinists William Harvey and Erin Aldridge, violist Tze-Ying Wu, and cellist Onczay reveled in Don Freund’s “Summersongs” (String Quartet Number 4). Performed without pauses, the quartet, says Freund, introduces “three tunes in search of a string quartet.” The introductions and the integration have been craftily baked into a layered dish, some of it highly seasoned for structural complexity and rhythmic intensity, some of it mild for easy ingestion. The well-prepared presentation helped make “Summersongs” a tasty repast.