Chamber Series Finds Joys in Unlikely Places

Roth Hall, site of the first presentation of this season’s In the Music Room series, sounds better than it looks. The spartan venue at Crossroads School in Santa Monica is a low-tech space, by default rather than design, that seats about 100 people and is marked by exposed ventilation ducts and an absence of decoration.

As a room for hearing chamber music, however, it does its job in terms of clarity and sonic weight. And wonders were conveyed there on Monday--by Schubert’s Trio in E flat and its sterling executants, veterans Daniel Shulman, pianist-director of the series, and cellist Daniel Rothmuller, with their young colleague, the extravagantly gifted violinist (and, obviously, a born chamber music player) Isabella Lippi.

Schubert’s miraculously coherent mixture of love songs, peasant dances, funeral anthems and battle cries found ideal interpreters in this finely meshed threesome. Their playing blended the lyric and heroic in ideal proportion. Lippi’s violin soared, to coin the cliche, while Rothmuller’s cello conveyed the sorrowing tread of the slow movement’s memorable theme with utmost poignancy, with Shulman providing an energetic leading voice and rhythmic underpinning with equal adeptness.

Where Schubert’s trio conforms to the notion of “heavenly length,” the Brahms Quartet in A, Opus 26, strikes these ears as merely very long: a succession of alternatingly inspired and commonplace thematic fragments that the composer tosses out with little regard for development or for the physical endurance of the executants.

With violist Jennie Hansen as the fourth member, the ensemble survived this ordeal by Brahms with minimal mishap.

It should be noted that Monday’s concert marked the start of a two-season-long survey of the Schubert and Brahms chamber works with piano by In the Music Room players. The prospect is a most pleasing one.