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Party music by Atlanta Chamber Players
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
Atlanta Chamber Players. Tuesday at Georgia State University’s Florence Kopleff Recital Hall. www.atlantachamberplayers.com
In the “Fiery Red” finale of Jennifer Higdon’s Piano Trio — of pounded hard surfaces and relentless, industrial motion — the Atlanta Chamber Players took the energized and enigmatic music to the breaking point.
Is the music a sardonic commentary on our modern and increasingly desensitized world? Is the exuberance meant to evoke kids on a playground, swinging higher and higher, oblivious to danger? What’s it all mean?
In her music, Higdon — a Philadelphia composer raised in Atlanta and now performed world-wide — asks more questions than she answers. And her 2003 trio, loaded with compelling but vague imagery, looked and sounded fiendishly difficult to play.
Yet Tuesday at Kopleff Recital Hall, pianist Paula Peace, violinist Christopher Pulgram and cellist Brad Ritchie delivered the complete package: personality, virtuosity and a vivid sense of engagement. The music was important to them. This convinced the audience that it should be important to us, too.
That attitude — eloquent, affirming, hungry to communicate — covered the entire concert. Peace, who founded the group 29 years ago, also has a knack for smart programming. Here she juxtaposed two recent melting-pot American works with jazzy music from 1920s Paris.
A 1990 Piano Trio by Bright Sheng, a Shanghai-born composer now teaching in Michigan, came as the evening’s happiest discovery. He fuses the off-balance rhythms and gutsy, nasal twangs of his native Chinese folk music with Western classical forms. Fresh, playful and profound, Sheng’s voice is among the most compelling on the scene today.
In Francis Poulenc’s 1926 Trio for Piano, Oboe and Bassoon, Peace was joined by Russ deLuna and Carl Nitchie. They found a range of moods, from insouciant to disarmingly tender. Nitchie, the ASO’s principal bassoonist, sang with a bright, burnished tone, sounding at times almost like a French horn.
Although the hall’s noisy ventilation system tried to distract us from the quiet, songful middle movement, the players’ engagement with the music kept our attention rapt.
Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu’s 1927 ballet score, “La Revue de Cuisine,” featured Atlanta’s all-star talent. Among the six musicians were Laura Ardan on clarinet and Christopher Martin on trumpet.
They had a grand time romping through this jazzy, neo-classical “Kitchen Revue.” With the Charleston and Tango among the invited guests, the music seems like a party thrown by Jay Gatsby. It lasted just 15 minutes but could have gone on all night.
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