North Shore Chamber Festival marks 15 years with a feast of romantic works
The North Shore Chamber Music Festival (NSCMF) is celebrating its 15th anniversary this season, once again offering its customary three-concert series at Northbrook’s Village Presbyterian Church during the first week of June.
Founded in 2011 by north suburban residents Vadim Gluzman and Angela Yoffe, over its 15 years the festival has developed a devoted live audience, now expanding online via the Violin Channel, and has become the unofficial start of Chicago’s classical summer season. Friday’s generous middle program offered music of Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Brahms, with a world premiere from one of the festival’s regular players.
Honoring its history, Friday’s concert began with three musicians who have been with the NSCMF from the start—clarinetist Ilya Shterenberg, violist Atar Arad, and pianist William Wolfram—featured in Schumann’s Fairy Tales, Op. 132. One hears in this atypically untroubled music echoes of Schumann’s encounter with the young Brahms, and the three festival stalwarts wholly broadcast this sunny sensibility, playing with easy ensemble evincing their many years of collaboration.
At times Arad’s tempered middle voice became lost amid the greater projection of the piano and clarinet, but the Israeli-born violist remains a force of nature. He recently celebrated his 80th birthday, and was honored with an award marking this occasion by Gluzman and Yoffe Friday night. Arad has also taken up composition late in life, and the second half opened with the world premiere of his Avivim.
Avivim began life as a solo cello work inspired by Botticelli’s “Primavera”; the work was heard Friday in Arad’s new arrangement for viola and clarinet. The original set of six miniatures was titled simply Aviv, or “Spring,” while the plural Avivim reflects multiple voices.
The compact movements have an enigmatic, aphoristic quality, capturing a single feeling or idea in the span of a few minutes. Musical allusions abound, with isolated quotations from The Rite of Spring and “Simple Gifts” making fleeting appearances. Adar and Shterenberg were simpatico partners in the violist’s quirky work, whipping up an almost Bacchic energy in the concluding “Spring Dance.”
The acclaimed Ariel Quartet, founded in Israel in 1998 and quartet-in-residence at Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, gave an incendiary account of Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No. 6 in A Minor, Op. 80, to close the first half. Op. 80 is Mendelssohn’s final completed work, written several months after the death of his beloved sister Fanny. Mendelssohn himself would succumb to a series of strokes two months after finishing the quartet, which is in an anguished, nervy vein that starkly contrasts with his more genial output.
The Ariel Quartet wholly inhabited Mendelssohn’s darker hues, maintaining remarkable energy and tension throughout their vigorous account. First violinist Gershon Gerchikov played with blistering intensity from first to last, supported in this focus by his colleagues Alexandra Kazovsky (violin), Jan Grüning (viola), and Amit Even-Tov (cello). The four had difficulty pivoting from the restless animation of the three fast movements to the more inward expression of the Adagio, Mendelssohn’s final “Song Without Words,” where one wanted a more reflective approach. But, overall, this was an impactful, memorable performance.
The evening ended with Brahms’ String Sextet in G Major, Op. 18. When the musicians were seated one saw Gluzman, sitting first violin, whispering to his colleagues to nix the first movement’s substantial repeat, apparently aware that the long musical evening had become perhaps too much of a good thing.
For the Brahms, three NSCMF regulars were paired with young laureates of the Festival’s Arkady Fomin Scholarship Fund: Gluzman was joined by violinist Hina Khuong-Huu, Adar by violist Julian Rhee, and cellist Ani Aznavoorian by James Baik.
Unfortunately, this Brahms remained largely earthbound, failing to capture the early score’s pastoral feel. The theme and variations of the Andante went best, its somber tone set by Adar’s opening viola solo and the variations’ mercurial characters collectively captured. The closing Rondo has somewhat more of the reflective, autumnal air one hopes for, and the vigorous coda, again launched by Adar, ended the ample evening with gusto.
The North Shore Chamber Music Festival concludes 7:30 p.m. Saturday with music of Vivaldi, Rota, Wiancko, and Heidrich. nscmf.org
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