Review: Richmond Festival (4)

Richmond Festival of Music
March 18, Virginia Holocaust Museum

James Wilson’s Richmond Festival of Music concluded its 2007 edition with works by Gideon Klein and Erwin Schulhoff, Czech Jewish composers who died in the Holocaust, alongside contemporary pieces recalling klezmer, the vernacular Jewish music of Eastern Europe.

The setting for the performances was one of the most striking the city has to offer: a replica of a baroque Lithuanian synagogue, built inside an old tobacco warehouse converted a few years ago into the Virginia Holocaust Museum.

Laura DeLuca, principal clarinetist of the Seattle Symphony, used the space most effectively in "T’Filat Nish Mati" ("My Soul’s Prayer"), an improvisatory soliloquy by the Israeli composer Ora Bat Chaim, which DeLuca played, unseen, from the balcony.

Betty Olivero’s "Four Yiddish Dances," from the Israeli-born composer’s score for the Paul Wegener’s 1920 silent film "Der Golem," featured DeLuca on clarinets, with violinists Frank Huang and Adela Peña, violist Mark Holloway and cellist Michelle Djokic. The string players buttressed DeLuca’s klezmer-style clarinet leads with accordion-like tones and swirling, high-register effects.

The program opened with "Lullaby and Doina" by Osvaldo Golijov, the Argentine-American composer celebrated for his blending of Jewish and gypsy music, tango and neoclassical styles. The piece, another adaptation of music originally for a film (Sally Potter’s "The Man Who Cried"), was propelled by darkly expressive exchanges between DeLuca and Peña and/or Holloway, the latter producing especially fibrous sonorities.

Those contemporary works bracketed Klein’s String Trio and Schulhoff’s Concertino for flute, viola and double-bass, which filter Czech and other Central European folk and vernacular song and dance through mainstream mid-20th century styles, echoing composers such as Janácek and Bartók.

Huang, Holloway and Djokic were tightly woven voices in the Klein trio, riding the exuberant, improvisatory sounding dance movements that open and close the work and exploiting both the virtuosic opportunities and moody expressiveness of a set of variations on a chorale tune in its central movement.

Flutist and piccolo player Mary Boodell, violist Holloway and double-bassist Fred Dole gave an animated, playful account of Schulhoff’s concertino, nicely contrasting its "oriental" harmonic effects within its generally neoclassical style. Holloway’s two-handed pizzicato in the closing rondino movement was a highlight of the performance.

* * *

Wilson, a popular cellist and chamber player during his 14 years in Richmond (10 of them in the Shanghai Quartet), has proven to be a master presenter in the three years he has staged this late-winter festival. This year's concerts, studded with musical discoveries such as the Klein and Schulhoff pieces and the previously unknown string-quintet arrangement of Beethoven's "Kreutzer" Sonata, and showcasing such formidable talents as Peña, the founding violinist of the Eroica Trio, and Djokic, associate principal cellist of the San Francisco Symphony, set a standard for programming and performance that few other classical events in these parts will come close to matching.