Music Review : American Chamber Players at Beckman Auditorium

The novelty of Sunday afternoon’s Coleman Chamber Music Concert in Beckman Auditorium on the Caltech campus was not John Harbison’s “Twilight Music,” which the same artists, the Washington, D.C.-based American Chamber Players, had first presented locally a year ago, but the juvenile Felix Mendelssohn’s B-minor Piano Quartet, not heard here within recorded memory.

Mendelssohn’s heavily padded Quartet, with its slender thematic content and dense textures--hardly clarified by the tendency of the otherwise excellent pianist, Ann Schein, toward excessive use of the sustaining pedal--added nothing to our knowledge of the composer at age 15.

Its executants, in addition to Schein, were violinist Alexis Galperine, violist Miles Hoffman and cellist Julia Lichten.

A re-hearing of “Twilight Music,” however, confirmed the viability of an attractively blues-tinged, easily assimilable (as previously noted) work for the same instrumental combination employed by Brahms in his Opus 40 Trio: horn, violin and piano, played, respectively--and very handsomely--by Anthony Cecere, Galperine, and Schein.

The program concluded with a bright, brisk and cleanly executed “Trout” Quintet of Schubert from the artists heard in the Mendelssohn augmented by the spirited double-bass of Frank Carnovale.