Tchaikovsky Sextet Performers July 30

VOM FESTIVAL'S CLOSING CONCERT A CELEBRATION FOR STRINGS

At the closing concert of most music festivals there is a tinge is sadness, with attendees knowing it will be a whole year before again the delights of semi-alfresco music and social camaraderie highlight the summer. It was that way with the last Valley of the Moon Music Festival July 30 at Sonoma Valley’s Hanna Center.

The program featured just two works, a transcription for piano quartet of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, and Tchaikovsky’s String Sextet in D Minor, Op. 70, with the title “Souvenir of Florence.” The Symphony arrangement was made by the composer’s student Ferdinand Ries in 1830.

Over 35 minutes the ensemble of Ava Gehlen-Williams (violin), violist Maren Rothfritz, Jasmine Pai (cello) and pianist April Sun forged a scrappy performance that was surprisingly carefully detailed in attacks, releases, voice leading and intonation. Ms. Sun’s piano line often rumbled in loud fast passages as the great themes of the opening Allegro con Brio unfolded. Some of the best playing came in the Scherzo Minuetto.

The opening E Flat Major chords were played forte (though not too loud) and the magical drama started, and just a few seconds later Ms. Pai guided the music into alien C Sharp. It’s that kind of work, clearly revolutionary for 1803, and the playing became more concise in the laconic Marcia Funebra with broad scale intensity, jumping from key to key.

The quartet captured the gathering energy and many off-beat instrumental accents of the Scherzo, and Ms. Sun’s tremolos in the finale’s variations, the theme of which Ms. Gehlen-William projected wonderfully. So many things in this movement are familiar, as with the Eroica Variations from three years earlier, and the quartet slowed the pace near the end that underscored the potent force of the monumental music.

As always with the c. 1841 piano, I don’t hear clarity in the ensemble, but perhaps that’s just a lifetime of listening to modern concert grands and their warm, clear sonority and a treble that carries. Well, it is a festival, and for nine years has been welcome to rarely performed scores and instrumental combinations from prior to 1914. The Quartet received a standing ovation from the audience of 125, with additional viewers streaming.

Moving to the Tchaikovsky sextet, with the two cellos (Tanya Tomkins and Jasmine Pai) seated in the middle, was sonically a bit wrenching but the performance was first cabin, and everyone get the opportunity for solos. Here were the composer’s frequent staccato passages (reminiscent of his Pizzicato Ostinato in the Fourth Symphony) and classy little diminuendos and ritards from Ms. Wong’s violin line. Vibrato was large in the famous second movement Adagio cantabile, as was portamento. Ms. Pai phrased in a Q & A manner.

The long third movement featured themes that again were luxurious, never clipped, and both violinists used a spicatto bow technique. The finale’s themes, based on a Russian folk song, had resonant cello playing that one usually hears in Hanna, and the playing near the end became orchestral, bordering on a tarantella. The many modulations and sonic climaxes were splendidly performed.

The Sextet's 37-minute performance generated another standing ovation, and the audience repaired to the sunny patio for the de rigueur reception.

Before the concert Kate Van Orden, the Festival’s perennial musicologist and lecturer, presented an engaging Blattner Series talk regarding the art of musical transcription, with ample videos and humor.