Chamber group in need of a leader

Small chamber groups tend to fall into two types: those dominated by a single person and those made up of contending individuals. But what happens when no one takes the lead, as was the case with Southwest Chamber Music members Tuesday at Zipper Hall at the Colburn School of Performing Arts?

In the case of Max Reger’s Quintet in C minor for Piano and Strings, it meant music without a strong profile or character, a sense of flow, direction or goal, and in general many missed opportunities. Violinists Mark Menzies and Johnny Chang, violist Jan Karlin, cellist Paula Fehrenbach and pianist Gayle Blankenburg had all the notes, but kept deferring to each other. The music’s drama just dissipated.

The program, the third of four concerts in the series called “Autumn Twilight: Late Romantic Music from 1875 to 1918,” opened with a rare piece of piano music by Wagner, “Album Leaf for Betty Schott,” and continued with Liszt’s “The Lugubrious Gondola” for cello and piano and “At the Grave of Richard Wagner” for piano. All were carefully played by Blankenburg alone or with Fehrenbach.

The other big piece was Mahler’s “Songs of a Wayfarer” arranged for voice and 10 instrumentalists by Schoenberg at a time, 1921, when performances of Mahler’s music were hard to come by. Soprano Kathleen Roland was the low-voltage soloist. The ensemble honored Schoenberg’s wise and delicate balance of sonorities. Founding artistic director Jeff von der Schmidt conducted cautiously.