A Program Infused With Nostalgia

The third program of Southwest Chamber Music’s summer series at the Huntington Library proved uncommonly ripe and reflective, as heard Saturday evening in the first of two weekend performances. Devoted to late blossoms of the Romantic tradition, the agenda moved with leisured grace through a rather narrow compass.

Elgar’s Piano Quintet in A minor was the culmination. Though composed in 1919, it is a conservative work by a conservative composer. It suggests Brahms readily in both rhetorical sweep and specific detail, though its subjects--particularly the nostalgic theme opening the Adagio--are quite characteristic. For all its intelligence and purposefulness, however, it remains most memorable in its sad little waltzes and hints of decaying salon music.

Violinists Mark Menzies and Elizabeth Baker, violist Jan Karlin, cellist Paula Fehrenbach and pianist Gayle Blankenburg seemed to lose themselves in it at times. They could deliver warm, spirited playing, alert to the text and to each other, and then they would drift for a while with little sense of connection.

Though composed in 1932 and revealing the effect of Debussy and even Gershwin, the Piano Trio by Amy Beach shares a compositional world view with Elgar’s Quintet.

It is also in the same key, albeit less dogmatic about it and far less prolix. Menzies, Fehrenbach and Blankenburg gave it comfortable service, occasionally imprecise but generous in expression.

The program began oddly, with Benjamin Britten’s version of Purcell’s “Golden” Sonata.

Britten’s realization of the keyboard part gives the piano lots of murky bass, enlivened by florid scampers in the Canzona and the concluding jig.

It seemed awkwardly quaint at best, as stoically delivered here by Menzies, Baker, Fehrenbach and Blankenburg.