WEEKEND REVIEWS : Chamber Music in Open Air

Location, location, location! In real estate it’s said to be what ultimately determines the value of the property.

And in respect to location--at least during the summer--the Southwest Chamber Music Society’s concerts certainly have it at the Loggia of the Huntington Library’s main gallery: magnificent visually and less predictable, considering its open-air exposure, acoustically. A magnificent place to be at sunset on Saturday, when the Southwest musicians began to project the twilight moods and colors of Amy Beach’s Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet, completed in 1920.

The piece does, however, have a turn-of-the-century feel: not a reflection of cozy Victoriana, but of a certain harmonic and emotional restlessness. The spirit of Mahler is brought to mind in the highly chromatic waltz variation, but Mahler more in a wistful than bared-teeth mood. There are suggestions too of Delius’ Orientalism, but toughened by Beach into something less gauzy, more invasive.

The Southwest String Quartet--violinists Peter Marsh and Susan Jensen, violist Jan Karlin, cellist Leighton Fong--and particularly the flutist, Dorothy Stone, projected the work’s half-lights sensitively and, when required, spiritedly.

Nor was there any lack of spirit in the presentation of Elgar’s roughly contemporaneous but more backward-looking Sonata in E minor for Violin and Piano.

The performance by Peter Marsh and the commanding pianist, Susan Svrcek, was clearly a labor of love, gaining cohesiveness as it progressed to the finale.

The familiar work on the program was Borodin’s usually gracious and endearing String Quartet in D, on this occasion a dead loss as a consequence of Marsh’s inability to find the intonational handle for the duration of the opening movement.