Review: Richmond Festival of Music

April 8, Second Presbyterian Church

The opening night of this spring’s Richmond Festival of Music closed with a loud, lengthy ovation for an ensemble that had just played the very dickens out of the String Quintet in E flat major, Op. 97, of Antonin Dvořák.

The piece, known as Dvorák’s Viola Quintet and also as the “American” (confusingly sharing that nickname with his String Quartet in F major, Op. 96), was the composer’s favorite work from his three-year interlude (1892-95) in the United States. If Dvořák had bothered to nickname it, he might have called it his "apotheosis of American dance."

Just about every dance tempo, rhythmic lilt and accent heard in this country’s music, from American Indian ritual and Protestant hymn-singing to the hoedown and cakewalk, find their way into this quintet. So do melodies garnished soulfully with flatted notes, as in Negro spirituals and the blues style that was just taking shape as Dvořák was getting his earful of Americana.

Violinists Carmit Zori and Jessica Lee, violists Molly Sharp and David Cerutti and cellist James Wilson (artistic director of the festival) neglected none of those ingredients, and gave due attention on the composer’s patina of romantic style and classical technique. Sharp made eloquent work of the larghetto's stoically heartfelt main theme. But this performance was mostly driven by infectious rhythmic energy and go-for-broke expressivity – even at the cost of occasionally shaky intonation.

The Dvořák capped an evening of rarities from native and émigré composers in the first of five programs that will be devoted entirely to American chamber music. In this opening program, Dvořák and Aaron Copland shared the bill with Thea Musgrave, Arthur Farwell and Anthony Philip Heinrich.

Heinrich was the joker in the hand, an early 19th-century immigrant from Bohemia and self-taught composer of blowsy showpieces. His "Yankee Doodliad – a National Divertimento" (1820), runs "Yankee Doodle" through a set of increasingly, verging on preposterously, florid variations, with a cockeyed yet stately march tune ("Huzzah for Washington!") plopped in the middle. Lee, Zori, Wilson, pianist Carsten Schmidt and flutist Mary Boodell (playing a part originally for fiddle, rearranged by Wilson) played up its serio-comic flourishes and played down its near-chaotic internal dynamics.

The riotous Heinrich was followed by Musgrave’s Elegy (1970) for viola and cello, a rigorous and eventful miniature that doesn’t feel elegaic in the usual manner – rather, like an accumulation of fragmentary or fleeting memories. (The fragmentation is induced, sort of, as the score lacks bar lines.) Cerutti and Wilson played it alertly and with an expressive reserve that suited the piece.

Boodell and Schmidt delivered a bright, animated account of Copland’s Duo (1971) for flute and piano, the composer’s last major work, a well-crafted, concise piece that manages to be nostalgic (with clear echoes of "Fanfare for the Common Man" and "Appalachian Spring") without being sentimental.

Playing four of Farwell’s "American Indian Melodies" (1900) and his "Ichibuzzhi" (1903), Schmidt brought out the Chopinesque qualities of these treatments of American Indian chant and dance. Alas, unlike Chopin, Farwell didn’t put his material through any real development, simply giving it a European harmonic gloss.

The Richmond Festival of Music continues with concerts on April 12 in the chapel of Second Presbyterian Church, April 29 at Second Presbyterian, May 2 at Bon Air Presbyterian Church and May 3 at the Virginia Holocaust Museum, all at 8 p.m. Tickets: $25. Free "Ear Project" mini-concerts will be staged on April 12 at the Chester Library and May 3 at the Richmond Public Library’s downtown main branch, both at 11 a.m. Details: (804) 519-2098; www.richmondfestivalofmusic.org