Chicago Classical Review

“Wunderkind!!!” was the nuanced title for the opening program at this year’s North Shore Chamber Music Festival. As Vadim Gluzman and Angela Yoffe, the couple behind the festival, mentioned in their welcoming remarks Wednesday night at the Village Church in Northbrook, the term applied not just to the composers on tap, but to four of the evening’s musicians.

Now marking its 16th season, the festival, in addition to presenting three chamber concerts every June with top artists, has also done yeoman work teaching and promoting the musicians of tomorrow. The Arkady Fomin Scholarship Fund has aided more than 80 young musicians over the past 15 years. Four awardees, three of whom are now adults embarked on successful careers, took part in the evening’s program, all blending seamlessly with their more veteran colleagues Wednesday night.

The program centered on music of Felix Mendelssohn, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, three of the most remarkable prodigies in music history.

It’s been heartening over the past two decades to see Korngold’s brilliant Violin Concerto work its way from semi-obscurity into becoming regular concert-hall repertory. Perhaps more advocacy will do the same for Korngold’s still-neglected chamber music, like the excellent performance of the composer’s String Sextet served up by festival musicians Wednesday night.

Korngold was prolific in writing for small forces and his chamber oeuvre also includes three string quartets, a piano quintet, piano trio, violin sonata, piano sonata, and a suite for three strings and left-hand piano.

Korngold’s Sextet, completed at age 17, clearly takes some inspiration from Brahms’ two sextets but quickly veers off into the teenage composer’s already developed richly chromatic and individual style.

Despite being half an ad hoc grouping, the six musicians—violinists Joshua Brown and Adam Barnett-Hart, violists Masumi Rosted and Pierre Lapointe, and cellists Mark Kosower and Brook Speltz—made a superb and cohesive ensemble for this engaging yet intensely challenging work. (Barnett-Hart, Lapointe and Speltz are members of the Escher String Quartet, which will perform as a unit on Friday’s program.)

The players fluently handled the abrupt rhythmic gearshifts of the framing movements, brought out the soaring rhapsodic essence of Korngold’s lyrical flights, put across the off-kilter Viennese waltz in the Intermezzo, and delivered the brilliance and wit of the galumphing finale with fizzing bravura.

The concert led off with Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio in C minor. No, not that Mendelssohn Trio in C minor—Op. 66, a work of the composer’s maturity—but a childhood work (MWV Q3) written for violin, piano and viola rather than cello. 

The performance paired Fomin awardees Brown (2017) and pianist Lucas Chiche (2026) with violist Rostad. (“I’m actually ten years old,” Rostad joked in his introduction, surrounded by such musical youth.)

Written at age 11, Mendelssohn’s early Trio is strikingly well-crafted and wholly characteristic in its ingratiating lyricism and effervescent charm, with the Adagio plumbing surprising emotional depth. The musicians made the best possible case for this long-lost work, delivering refined and close-knit ensemble, with the 14-year-old Chiche’s confident playing and rippling keyboard virtuosity in the finale most impressive.

Pianist Janice Carissa (2019 Fomin winner) took the stage for both works after intermission, breaking up the all-male roster of the first half.

Saint-Saëns’ Valse Caprice was originally written as an etude for solo piano before Eugene Ysaÿe turned it into a popular violin showpiece in his retooled duo arrangement. 

This was the work in which Joshua Brown debuted at the festival a decade ago, as he noted in his humorous introduction. Brown asked how many people were at that 2016 concert and several people raised their hands. A surprised Brown said, “I thought it would only be my mother.”

While the young violinist showed himself an admirable chamber colleague on the first half, Brown displayed great individual personality in this fiddle confection. He teased out the waltzing main theme with delicious insinuation and brought exhilarating bravura to the fireworks as well as dollops of musical charm. Pianist Carissa delivered assertive and forceful keyboard playing in a supporting role, though her habit of instantly raising her hands high after every fortissimo became a visual distraction.

There were no such distractions in the final work, Mendelssohn’s Concerto for Piano, Violin and Strings, largely because Carissa was practically invisible behind the string quintet players sitting in front of her.

Even with that lapse in stage presentation, the pianist and violinist Gluzman, proved admirable partners in this tuneful work, another product of Mendelssohn’s  prodigious youth, written at age 14. 

Gluzman, the festival’s artistic director, brought characteristic tonal gleam, technical polish and fiery virtuosity to this co-starring role. Despite the violinist having to turn and look behind to coordinate with the pianist at times, the soloists made simpatico collaborators with Carissa providing equally lively and commanding playing in the rollicking final movement. Both were at their best in the rapt Adagio, essentially a long duo cadenza, bringing poised expression to Mendelssohn’s tender melody.

The string quintet is largely a backing role but violinists Barnett-Hart, Julian Rhee (Escher Quartet’s second-violin sub and a 2022 Fomin awardee), violist Lapointe, cellist Speltz and double-bass Kurt Muroki provided sympathetic support.

The only real complaint about the concert, besides starting 15 minutes late, was the atrocious behavior of some of the audience members. While respectful during the performances, the ceaseless applause after every movement was distracting and, at one point, proved disruptive. Some eager beavers jumped in with bravos and applause after a flourish in the Saint-Saëns, interrupting the performance while the piece was still minutes away from the double bar.

Worse still were the many amateur videographers in the audience who wanted to document the concert via smartphones for their private collections. That included the fellow in the sixth row who held his phone high, oblivious to the people sitting behind him, to record the entire final movement of the Mendelssohn concerto.

The North Shore Chamber Music festival continues 7:30 p.m. Friday with Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, Dvořák’s “American” String Quartet, Samuel Barber’s Adagio and Josef Suk’s Elegie. nscmf.org

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