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‘Trout’ Quintet from Georgian Chamber Players
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
Georgian Chamber Players. Sunday at Spivey Hall in Morrow. www.spiveyhall.org.
The Georgian Chamber Players are more enlightened than most local ensembles, but there’s a hitch.
Sunday afternoon at Spivey Hall, the concert began with cellist Christopher Rex and double bassist Ralph Jones — both are section principals in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra — chatting with the audience about a rarity, Rossini’s lyrical and frothy Duo in D. The banter playfully and intelligently covered what the listener should expect. They talked about the Duo’s composition history, written in 1824 for legendary bass virtuoso Domenico Dragonetti.
They also managed a gee-whiz moment: Rex showed off his latest toy, a Music Pad Pro, which looks similar to a traditional music stand but is really a computer screen that displays sheet music. Rex “turned” the pages using a footpedal. Soon all musicians will use gizmos like these. We saw it here first, and the audience oo’d and ah’d as if Rossini himself had walked onstage.
It was a brilliant little performance, this introduction. Rex and Jones could have simply walked on stage, taken a bow and launched into the music; instead, they had our interest maximally piqued.
Then they started to play.
The Rossini duo seemed thrown together, on little or no rehearsal. That wasn’t tragic: in their hands the music didn’t take itself too seriously, singing and frolicking like partiers at a pub after last-call.
But the same cavalier approach, on a much bigger scale, proved embarrassing for Schubert’s oft-performed “Trout” Quintet. It sounded entirely unprepared. Aside from nice turns of phrase by violinist Beth Newdome — a former ASO assistant concertmaster — and by pianist Valentina Lisitsa, the music held little charm. In place of fiery elegance we were given bluster, the notes crammed together without insight or purpose. Schubert’s quiet sections, which can hold a sense of melancholy and infinite serenity, fell apart, devoid of tension and emotion.
In the Schubert, as in the Rossini, Jones was unable to play two consecutive passages in tune. In the Schubert, Reid Harris — ASO principal violist — botched several exposed passages. This is not especially difficult music. Thus the performers’ serious shortcomings were all the more curious. Are members of the Georgian Chamber Players overbooked, with no time to prepare for their own concert? Do they think no one is listening?
Mercifully, the afternoon included Alfred Schnittke’s satirical, sophisticated “Gogol Suite,” in a two-piano arrangement bracingly performed by Lisitsa and her husband, Alexei Kuznetzoff, both from Ukraine now living in the U.S.
Schnittke was the leading Soviet composer during the empire’s last decades. Like a wacky cartoon soundtrack, his suite quotes and parodies everything at hand, from Beethoven’s Fifth to the heavy Shostakovich sound to Indonesian gamelan. And like the best satire, it pokes fun at convention but, by the end, creates its own deeply felt world.
You can easily imagine Schnittke (the artist) as a sort of class clown at school whose slapstick covers a painful wreck of a home life (Soviet oppression). Once you know his story, the sly musical gags take on a level of pathos that’s poignant, almost unbearable. The wife and husband duo — Lisitsa is the stronger player — fully got the references and the jokester-heroic spirit. They took the music, and thus their performance, seriously.
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