Music Reviews : Korngold Suite Opens Chamber Season at Taper

Works by Viennese composers, works markedly different from each other but exhibiting more than a little of the musical lilt associated with that Austrian city, filled the Mark Taper Forum at the Music Center on Sunday morning.

These works--Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s almost completely neglected Suite, Opus 23, and Brahms’ often-ignored String Quartet in B-flat, Opus 67--composed the program at the opening event of the 10th season of Chamber Music at the Taper. And a happy event it was.

Playing what was probably (there is a story in that probably ) the first local performance of the Suite for piano, two violins and cello written here by Korngold, on commission from the one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein, an ensemble made up of Gary Graffman, Kathleen Lenski, Roger Wilkie and Stephen Erdody made a persuasive case for the forgotten piece.

It is a charming and straightforward work in five contrasting movements, combining lush melodies and that harmonic style Nicolas Slonimsky has called “judicious modernism,” a style to which Korngold subscribed wholeheartedly throughout his career.

Within the frame of its two serious outer movements, the composer surrounds a central, post-Schumann scherzo with a Waltz and a Lied, each seductively lyrical. The one-hand piano part demands virtuosity and leadership, qualities Graffman supplied with his usual authority. In equal contributions, his colleagues probed the pleasures in this score.

With their partner, violist Brian Denbow, Lenski, Wilkie and Erdody opened this genial morning as the Angeles Quartet, and gave Brahms his due in a warmly inflected, tightly paced and affectionate performance of Opus 67.

Deceptively sunny, the B-flat Quartet nevertheless contains many seeds of the melancholy Brahms; perhaps that is its strength. Except for momentary scratchiness in the opening Vivace, this reading moved untroubled toward its final integration. Along the way, there was special comfort in the handsome matching of tone from the violins and in Denbow’s poignant playing of the viola solos in the final movements.

Henri Temianka, director of these concerts--subsequent events are scheduled Oct. 22, Nov 19 and Dec. 10--acted again as raconteur in introducing both works. He explained that Korngold’s widow, in describing Wittgenstein’s local performance of the Suite in her memoirs, did not specify if it was public or private. Thus the confusion.