Music Reviews : Opening of ‘An Affair With Brahms’ Chamber Festival

The fourth Chamber Music/LA Festival is “An Affair With Brahms,” organized around a sequence of his chamber music progressing from a duo to a sextet. The structure may seem gimmicky, but the affair promises to be a passionate one, based on the opening performances Monday evening.

Ardor, indeed, was the principal thing the festival had going for it Monday, when a surprisingly unsophisticated and talkative audience filled most of the Japan America Theatre for generally handsome and heated accounts of familiar pieces.

In the namesake portion of the agenda, Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi offered Brahms’ Cello Sonata in F, with pianist Doris Stevenson. Tsutsumi’s constant mugging and miming could have left even the hearing-impaired with few questions about his interpretive position, though with his extravagant body language, his physical position on his chair was often in doubt.

All of that was expressive overkill, for Tsutsumi also made his points musically emphatic. Commanding a warm, burnished sound and a fluent, articulate bow, the Banff and Indiana University faculty member easily communicated the sonic richness of the score, in an emotionally urgent, technically assured reading.

Stevenson was a full and active partner in the effort, readily accommodating Tsutsumi’s wide dynamic range and unexaggerated tempo liberties.

Violinist and festival artistic director Yukiko Kamei, violist Milton Thomas and bassist Buell Neidlinger joined Tsutsumi and Stevenson in Schubert’s apparently inevitable “Trout” Quintet. Stevenson’s round-toned, rhetorically pointed playing dominated the outgoing performance. The titular variations proved unexpectedly troubled and charmless, but otherwise the festival version proceeded zestfully.

The concert began with Haydn’s “Lark” Quartet from Opus 64. Violinist Nina Bodnar led Kamei, Thomas and Tsutsumi in a balanced, romantic reading, distinguished more by sweet sound, unified ensemble and clear affection than by stylistic observances. Conviction and energy it also had in abundance, with Bodnar pressing home the charge in the moto perpetuo finale to breathless ruin.