Music Reviews : Chamber Music/LA Fest

It was a fitting way to close the five-program “Affair With Brahms,” the fourth annual Chamber Music/LA Festival at the Japan America Theatre.

The Sextet in B-flat, an early work in which the composer’s genius as a contrapuntalist is very evident, offers the six musicians significant technical and interpretive challenges. Those musicians certainly met the challenges Sunday, as they offered an emotionally charged, sensitive and nearly spotless reading.

Here was unified, synergetic playing; individual melodic lines emerged clearly, instruments blended exquisitely and dramatic statements were uttered uniformly. Violinists Paul Rosenthal and Yukiko Kamei, violists Milton Thomas and Marcus Thompson and cellists Nathaniel Rosen and Jeffrey Solow delivered an account marked by passion, tenderness and drama.

Before intermission, violinist Christiaan Bor, joined by Thompson, Solow and pianist Jerome Lowenthal, gave a dynamic, propulsive reading of Schumann’s Quartet in E-flat, although it took two movements for Lowenthal to shed the kinks from his playing.

The afternoon began with a taut, good-natured account of Mozart’s Trio in G, K. 564. Though Kamei played too assertively and thus took away some of the elegance of the work, she and the others--Lowenthal and Rosen--made a sure-footed, alert team.