Greenwich Music Festival

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from the Greenwich Citizen, May 2006

Dazzling Virtuosity, Challenging Music at Greenwich Music Festival

The Greenwich Music Festival appeared on the scene three years ago, unheralded and unannounced, except to the core musical community.

By last year, word had gotten around: Here were the finest young artists 'on the classical music scene, coming to Greenwich at the invitation of the festival's founders, Robert Ainsley and Greenwich resident Ted Huffman, to display their scorching talents, and to play music that challenged and extended our definitions of "classical."

This festival is the "next" in classical music. Serious attention was paid.

The third annual festival has grown to eight concerts in different venues, with 24 artists in performance. All young, all with talent that requires new superlatives, they are playing and singing varied repertoire in differing configurations of vocal and instrumental music.

This year's festival, called "The Year of Song," opened last Friday night with an evening of music by Robert and Clara Schumann, programmed movingly to tell the tale of their fabled love affair through narrative and music. It will close rousingly with Carl Orff's strange, unique cantata "Carmina Burana" on May 26.

The superb Antares Quartet, comprising of violin, cello, piano and clarinet, played Saturday night at Greenwich Library's Cole auditorium to a rapt and appreciative audience.

Beginning with Johannes Brahms' "Trio for Piano, Clarinet, and Violoncello, Op. 114," the youthful musicians showed passion from the opening, a plaintive cello statement joined by piano and clarinet. An intense, intriguing conversation among three instrumental voices, the work is subtle, mysterious. Allegro moved to sudden statements in the piano, urgency followed by meditative passages, little scales speaking back and forth in complex interplay. The piano underscored the sad sound of the cello, moving to a passage of intense sweetness. The movement, dynamically intriguing, closed on a sustained and quiet note.

Adagio opened with the clarinet against passages of utter tenderness in piano, the cello, joining a romantic dialogue. Another modulation and a poignant conversation led to roiling piano and a gorgeous closing chord.

A triple-meter statement in the clarinet opened Andantino grazioso, the cello being insistently questioned by clarinet. The movement erupted into a waltz with eloquent piano and ended with a rolling chord.

Allegro, the movement of resolution, opened with a singing cello against defining chords in the piano. The clarinet echoed a forceful cello passage, which led to choppy passages in piano with wonderful syncopation, a surge of tonal shading and a passionate ending.

Brahms was the perfect choice to introduce the "next generation of music," as his subtle use of architectonics and reverberations was brought to an entirely new level in Chinary Ung's "Spiral VI." This nine-minute work reaches for a fusion of Eastern and Western sounds and musical traditions. It created the effects of traditional Cambodian instruments by innovative demands whereby the piano became three instruments — a keyboard, a string (when the pianist stood and reached inside the piano) and a gong by his manipulation of the piano's harp.

Although there is no discernible time signature, the work was rhythmically comprehensible, containing many unison passages for the quartet. Throughout, cello and violin voices sang, the clarinet fluttered and twinged, the piano surprised and the audience paid attention to a sensational performance of a rather brilliant work.

"Antares" by Carter Pann, was commissioned by the quartet to feature each member in turn. It began quietly, in slow and dense chords.

Romantic and bucolic, with a McDowell-like cast, it grew to crescendo, the piano like a rushing brook, with lovely chords behind a unison song.

The second section began with an abrupt piano statement, then a scampering passage conveying urgency, and an interesting figure in clarinet. A key change and the violin sliding upward against a repeated fourth interval in the piano opened section three, the clarinet in low register and the cello a sad voice.

Section four was up-tempo, opening with a robust piano statement, the clarinet playing madly. Syncopation ensued, the music slowed, then rushed to a playful ending. A plaintive gypsy statement in section five pushed the solo violin to Paganini-esque heights, stretching it in a racing tour-deforce. Section six returned to lush, lilting melody with halcyon ending.

In response to ongoing applause, Antares returned for an encore of John Mackey's brilliant "Breakdown Tango," originally created for dancers, and with rhythms and dynamics that blended abnormal psychology and music, as well as Argentine and European musical tradition.

Rebecca Patterson, cello, Eric Huebner, piano, Garrick Zoeter, clarinet, and Vesselin Gellev, violin, took their bows. They created both a tonal and visual landscape — she in a draped red dress, Huebner's ginger hair painterly against the adobe-colored wall of Cole Auditorium.

Do not miss a performance of this virtuosic quartet, any time, anywhere.

Linda Phillips, a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee for her music review column in the Greenwich Citizen and her book To the Highest Bidder, is an amateur pianist and was a member of the performing duo Amor Artis. She writes on musical topics for Newport Life Magazine and won a Best Column of the Year award in 2002 from the Connecticut Press Club.

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