Oct. 22--Chicago audiences are spoiled for choice when it comes to chamber music. With so much quality homegrown activity raising public awareness of and receptivity to the rich chamber music repertory, it's no wonder the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center has established a strong beachhead in downtown Chicago in the course of its four seasons of residence at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance. Competition from the outside has actually proved to be a positive.
Co-artistic director-pianist Wu Han and colleagues actually perform more concerts on the road than they do back home. And a sizable number of chamber aficionados turned out for the opening concert of their fifth season at the Harris Theater on Wednesday night. To judge from the hearty applause that greeted them throughout the program, the audience liked what it heard and is primed for more.
More adventuresome programs are scheduled later in the season, but for the series opener, the visiting New Yorkers stuck to core Austro-German repertory for piano and strings. The seldom-heard Sextet in D by the teenage Felix Mendelssohn served as bridge from the high classicism of Haydn's Piano Trio No. 18 in A major to the high romanticism of Robert Schumann's Piano Quintet in E flat, Opus 44.
Wednesday's players represented a cross-generational mix of instrumental talent -- from CMSLC veterans Anne-Marie McDermott and Han on piano, Ani Kavafian on violin and Paul Neubauer on viola, to up-and-coming young musicians whose artistry has been nurtured through CMSLC's adjunct Chamber Music Society Two: pianist Michael Brown, violinist Chad Hoopes, violist Matthew Lipman, cellist Nicholas Canellakis and double bassist Joseph Conyers.
The Haydn served as a lively curtain raiser, the musical impulses passing from Han to Kavafian to Canellakis with a fluidity that suggested a well-mannered conversation among friends. The moments of Haydnesque wit were savored all around, and the finale was dispatched with a sprightly flourish.
Mendelssohn wrote his Sextet when he was all of 15, scoring it for the unusual combination of piano, violin, two violas, cello and double bass. The boy wonder made the keyboard part as difficult and showy as possible, all the better to display his virtuoso chops at the soirees that were so much a part of the Mendelssohn family's life.
This lightweight music cannot hold a candle to such masterpieces as the Mendelssohn Octet, but it is characteristic of the composer, even at so young an age, in its melodic charm, skillful development of materials and deft deployment of instruments. It deserves to be better known, and Wednesday's performers argued its merits convincingly. In full command of the virtuosic piano part, Brown sparked vigorous yet elegant exchanges with his colleagues. The Chicago-born Lipman's mellow-toned viola playing undergirded the lyrical Adagio movement most attractively.
The Piano Quintet surely is the finest of the love songs Schumann addressed to his wife, Clara. The one universally acknowledged masterpiece of the works on Wednesday's program, it drew an alert, sensitive and deftly coordinated reading from an ensemble headed by McDermott, the galvanizing and forthright pianist, with Kavafian, Hoopes, Lipman and Canellakis as fully committed colleagues.
The players made much of contrasting musical materials, as when the bold, chordal opening theme of the first movement gave way to a tender conversation between the cello and viola. But sometimes they overdid the contrasts, sacrificing intensity as they slowed the pace and softened the sound for expressive effect.
I prefer my Schumann more urgent, red-blooded and straightforward, although I could not fault McDermott and friends for their fineness of blend, unanimity of phrasing or precision of attack and intonation.
The 2015-16 Harris Theater residency by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center will continue with concerts Nov. 13, Dec, 17, Feb. 16, March 9 and April 21; $35-$125; 312-334-7777, harristheaterchicago.org.
Of note: It's been a banner week for Chicago classical musicians vying in major world competitions. Pianist Kate Liu, 21, a Winnetka native and an alumna of the Music Institute of Chicago, took third prize as the highest-placing American in the 17th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. And cellist Brannon Cho, a junior music performance major in Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music, tied for second place in the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation's 2015 International Cello Competition.
John von Rhein is a Tribune critic.
jvonrhein@tribpub.com
