Surprise Elements
Now in its 41st year, the Sewanee Summer Music Center is a surprising creation. Despite some very modest expectations, year after year this program attracts bright students from around the world and gives them an excellent grounding in music. It also provides a series of public concerts that would, at times, do credit to the best-known festivals.
This concert series continues throughout the Summer Music Center’s term, and it features performances by faculty, students, and special guests. While one might expect the faculty and student concerts to vary in quality, the special-guest concerts are generally quite good. Even when the performances miscarry, as was the case with the recent Jacques Thibaud String Trio appearance, they are never really bad—they’re just short of the mark. When they are a success, as in last season’s performance by the Tokyo String Quartet, these concerts have surprising brilliance.
Such was the case with an astounding performance this year by the Adkins String Ensemble. There’s a fair chance that you haven’t heard of this sibling ensemble, since they’re a sort of groupe d’occasion. Most of them are graduates of SSMC, and they all hold principal chairs with orchestras throughout the U.S.: Violinist Elisabeth is the associate concertmaster with the National Symphony Orchestra, cellist Christopher is with the Dallas Symphony, Clare is the concertmaster of the Sherman Texas Symphony, cellist Anthony is with the Knoxville Symphony, Alexandra is concertmaster of the University of Michigan Symphony, and Madeline is the concertmaster of the University of North Texas Symphony Orchestra.
Like the SSMC program itself, this concert was full of surprises. For instance, each of the sisters except leader Elisabeth was equally adept at playing the violin and the viola. And their ensemble sound must be genetic, because they don’t play together as a group on a regular basis. The greatest surprise, however, was their flexibility: Although they were scheduled to perform the Mendelssohn String Trio and Tchaikovsky’s String Sextet, a last-minute family emergency resulted in a change of program—a startling offering of Boccherini, Kodaly, and Schumann.
Boccherini’s style is usually characterized as a pastel version of Haydn’s. Not so in the hands of the Adkins Ensemble. Joined by Elisabeth’s husband, pianist Edward Newman, they gave Boccherini’s piano version of the Ritirata di Madrid variations the heft and bite of a piano trio by Beethoven. The string players had grace, flexibility, and accuracy, but they balanced that with strength and power.
The Schumann Piano Quintet that closed the program was equally visceral, but the greatest surprise was Zoltan Kodaly’s Serenade for String Trio, op. 12. Even if Kodaly is generally considered somewhat more tuneful than his friend and compatriot Béla Bartók, this was an unusually bracing score. It wasn’t exactly an audience favorite, but it was superbly performed. The two violins and the viola attained an almost ideal blend, but the players also gave each other ample opportunity to shine for brief moments. And there were some truly noteworthy moments throughout: The lovely viola part in the second-movement lento was straight out of Debussy, and it shimmered with a kaleidoscope of viola color. The final movement had such force that it was impossible to believe that there were only three players.
If the SSMC festival guest concerts are surprising, the evenings featuring faculty members can be equally as delightful. What makes them even more surprising is the fact that these performances take place amid a full schedule of teaching. “It’s no vacation down there,” relates one former faculty member. “They work you.”
I was only able to make one faculty concert this year, and it happened to be one that included some members of the Adkins aggregation. Opening the evening was Beethoven’s op. 20 Septet, the work that made him famous during his own lifetime. The SSMC faculty gave it a competent performance, one in which clarinetist Bruce Dinkins and bassoonist William Ludwig sounded particularly good. Because of the particularly humid conditions atop Monteagle that evening, all the strings had articulation and pitch problems, but cellist Paul York managed some very sweet moments in the second movement.
Members of the brass faculty got a good workout with a piece called Encounter, while the second half of the program was devoted to one of the masterworks for large string ensembles, Mendelssohn’s Octet. The group again encountered some pitch problems, but the energy level more than made up for them. Most memorable were the lightness and suavity of the third-movement scherzo and the powerful presto finale. Indeed, if the scherzo had the high kick of a long distance runner, the finale had all the force of the Oilers’ defensive line. Mendelssohn’s burst of counterpoint at the very end had, to mix sports metaphors, all the excitement of watching a good basketball team in action—complete with a game-winning three-pointer at the final buzzer.
If the entire SSMC concert season provided a number of surprises, the greatest surprise was the professionalism of the students in the annual concerto concert. Even if few of the student participants in the program end up pursuing careers in music, that doesn’t mean that they settle for second best. At this season’s student concerto program, Ukranian trombonist Sergei Khmielevskoi gave the allegro movement from the Tomasi concerto a warmth of tone that suggested Tommy Dorsey; Julia Shaffer performed the “Sarao” movement from Rodrigo’s Concierto Serenata just as well as any famous harpist; Shannon Thomas provided a fully unbuttoned performance of Sarasate’s demonically difficult Zigeunerweisen; and cellist Will Prunkl’s playing of the allegretto from the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1 recalled that of the young Mischa Maisky.
Final concerts for this summer’s sessions concluded last Sunday afternoon. The students, faculty, and guest artists have packed up their music and instruments and gone off for a few well-deserved days of rest before the fall season begins. But come next summer, for the 42nd time, the surprises will begin again
Comments (0)