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Golijov by the Riverside Chamber Players
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
Riverside Chamber Players. Sunday at Centennial High School Auditorium, in Roswell. www.riversidechamberplayers.org.
Trading on the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s high-gloss reputation, many of its members moonlight in chamber ensembles, with mixed artistic success. Hungriest among them is the Riverside Chamber Players, based in Roswell.
Cellist and founder Joel Dallow, who lives in Roswell, serves as host, introduces the music, takes questions from the audience, recruits his family members to help sell tickets and, with his ASO colleagues, programs and performs concerts.
Sunday in Centennial High School’s auditorium — a brick-walled, acoustically clean space — the Riverside players showed enlightened taste and high virtuosity. The afternoon started small, with a duo: the Handel-Halverson “Passacaglia,” the latter composer’s transcription of Handel’s dazzling set of variations over a bassline, originally for harpsichord. Helen Kim, a former ASO violinist and now perhaps the strongest freelance musician in the region, paired with Catherine Lynn, an ASO violist with a chocolatey smooth tone. Together they created a plush, romanticized world, at turns indulgent or crisply pointilistic. A bravura display.
The ASO’s strategies for national success have not been lost on its musicians: don’t talk down to your audience, play energized concerts, offer a balance of classics and smart contemporary works. Thus the Riverside players put Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov’s compelling “Lullaby and Doina” on the program, here given its local premiere. (Golijov’s opera “Ainadamar” and “St. Mark” Passion have been the critical and popular hits of the ASO’s season.)
Written for Sally Potter’s 2000 film “The Man Who Cried,” “Lullaby and Doina” unfolds in three parts. First comes the cradle song as heard through the mists, with a pastoral, melancholy feel. Then an “ethnic” bit, where a klezmer clarinet introduces the far-away sounds of an Armenian duduk — an ancient shepherd’s flute — impersonated by the viola and, finally, an up-tempo, whirling, dizzying dance.
The 7-minute wordless song is scored for string quintet (violinists Kim and Sou-Chun Su, Lynn, Dallow and double bassist Douglas Sommer) plus flute (Christina Smith) and clarinet (Ted Gurch). Golijov keeps it clear, with only one voice “speaking� at a time. The mood throughout is melancholy, almost a resignation that life can be fulfilling, if not happy or prosperous. Amid the stark newness of this affluent suburb, Golijov’s music of permanent struggle and deep perspective seemed at once out of place and necessary, enriching.
Dallow and friends closed the afternoon with a loving and cautious reading of Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 59 no. 3.
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