Sonatas launch chamber season
By Ruth Bingham
Special to The Advertiser
Chamber music invites an audience to eavesdrop.
Unlike more public genres such as operas or symphonies, chamber music is a world unto itself, a world of musicians "talking" to each other in their own language. It is more about communication than themes.
Attending a chamber music concert is a bit like being invited into someone's living room to observe an intimate soirée.
Chamber Music Hawaii launched its Monday night soirées this week in a new living room, Windward Community College's beautiful Paliku Theatre.
The choice was a good one. Paliku Theatre is small enough to afford the necessary intimacy but large enough so that even the brass music did not "boom." Its acoustics, excellent for voices, are a bit dry for music but allow individual lines to stand out clearly.
Chamber Music Hawaii has four groups, the Galliard String Quartet, Spring Wind Quintet, Tresemble, and Honolulu Brass, each of which will present two concerts this season. For the first time, each concert will each be performed twice — once on the Windward side, then repeated in Honolulu. This concert's reprise happens tomorrow at the Doris Duke Theatre.
Monday night's program, "Sonata Fanatico," presented a series of short works performed by the Honolulu Brass, consisting of Mark Schubert and Ken Hafner (trumpets), Wade Butin (French horn), James Decker (trombone), and David Saltzman (tuba).
Works included sonatas by composers from the late 1600s/early 1700s to the 1900s. A sonata, incidentally, is sometimes called a form but is more accurately a compositional process of presenting musical material, transforming it, then returning to it with new perspective.
Overall, the program and performance were delightful.
Each of the musicians had star moments in the spotlight. In Saltzman's hands, the tuba became an agile solo instrument. Decker's precision and smooth tone were consistently fine. Butin was at his best in the Corelli and the Scarlatti, and Schubert and Hafner traded and interwove melodies with grace.
Of course, both the joy and peril of chamber music is that there is no place to hide. Every note is perfectly audible. The Honolulu Brass had occasional rough moments shifting between gears — from slow to fast between the first two movements of the Albinoni, or from baroque to contemporary in the openings of the Bourgeois and the Bozza.
But most of the performance charmed. The first movement of the Corelli, for example, could make one forsake the beauty of consonance for the sweet anguish of dissonance.
Few composers used dissonance so well.
An insider's art, chamber music survives because it is such fun to play. But it continues to draw audiences because of its subtle delights, its opportunities to get to know musicians "individually in a group," and its incomparable training for mind and ears: following multiple parts simultaneously, tracking large-scale structures while noticing details, sorting out musical conversations ... Sometimes listening can be as much fun as playing.
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Chamber Music Hawaii concerts
When: 7:30 p.m. Mondays
Honolulu Brass: tomorrow, Doris Duke Theatre, Honolulu Academy of Arts; March 8, Paliku Theatre, WIndward Community College; March 15, Doris Duke Theatre
Spring Wind Quintet: Oct. 6, Paliku Theatre; Oct. 27, Doris Duke Theatre; Jan. 5, Paliku Theatre; Jan. 12, Doris Duke Theatre
Galliard String Quartet: Nov. 10, Paliku Theatre; Nov. 17, Doris Duke Theatre; April 5, Paliku Theatre; April 12, Doris Duke Theatre
Tresemble: Dec. 1, Paliku Theatre; Dec. 8 , Doris Duke Theatre; May 3, Paliku Theatre; May 10, Doris Duke Theatre
Special concerts, 7:30 pm at the Doris Duke Theatre:
- CMH and pianist Lisa Nakamichi: Oct. 11
- CMH and soprano Lea Friedman: Feb. 2
- CMH, violinist Kathryn Lucktenberg and cellist Steven Pologe: March 22
Information: call Dave Wallerstein at 524-0815, ext. 245, or visit www.chambermusichawaii.com.
