FORT WORTH — If we still did end-of-year lists of top 10 performances, Wednesday night’s Mimir Chamber Music Festival concert would be a serious contender for No. 1. It was an unusual program, and a particularly appealing one, and it was elegantly performed by first-class musicians.
Marking its 28th anniversary at Texas Christian University, Mimir brings together outstanding performers from top orchestras and conservatories for programs including music you’ll rarely hear elsewhere. They also coach up-and-coming young ensembles, which perform their own concerts. This year’s Emerging Artists concerts present two string quartets and a piano trio.
The mix of faculty artists allows — indeed, encourages — imaginative programming. Wednesday’s concert, at PepsiCo Recital Hall, featured the Horszowski Trio — violinist Jesse Mills, cellist Ole Akahoshi and pianist Rieko Aizawa — with a couple of additions.
The program began with Gabriel Fauré’s Piano Trio, chamber music at its most exquisite. Completed in 1923, only a year before the composer’s death, and well after his ears had begun badly distorting pitches, it has an almost out-of-body beauty. Now that he could no longer accurately hear his music, what must have gone through Fauré’s head as he penned these soaring sequences, these suave twinings, these aching harmonies?
You could not ask for a more loving, a more elegant performance than the Horszowski’s. But with rather gentle-toned violin and cello, Aizawa, as wonderfully expressive as she was, was too often too loud in balances.
Both here and in the Schumann Piano Quartet, in the concert’s second half, I wondered if it would have been better with the piano lid on the short stick, or with another piano.
Following the Fauré, Aizawa’s own piano trio arrangement of Arnold Schoenberg’s 1911 Six Piano Pieces (Op. 19) wasn’t as shocking a shift as you might expect. Two years earlier, Schoenberg had written, “This multicolored, polymorphic, illogical nature of our feelings, and their associations, a rush of blood, reactions in our senses, in our nerves; I must have this in my music.”
Sure enough, these tiny pieces, no more than a minute apiece, seemed not intellectual exercises but fragments of thoughts and yearnings. Adding a few subtle bell sounds, the arrangement and performance were wholly convincing.
If Antonín Dvořák’s Five Bagatelles, for two violins, cello and harmonium, wouldn’t put a smile on your face, nothing would. Whether bouncy or reflective, they’re happily suffused with folk music influences, anchored by the gentle buzz of the reed organ.
Here Mimir executive director Curt Thompson played first violin, with Mills on second, Akahoshi and, at the harmonium, Aizawa. The playing was as irresistibly charming as the music, although more time might have been taken over three rising-and-falling passages in the fourth Bagatelle. And the harmonium could have been a little louder.
Violist Jessica Thompson joined the Horszowski for the Schumann, the four musicians eloquently realizing the score’s moods from hyperactive to deeply reflective. But again the piano was sometimes too loud.
Details
The Mimir Chamber Music Festival continues through July 11 at TCU’s PepsiCo Recital Hall, 2800 S. University Drive in Fort Worth. 817-984–9299, mimirfestival.org.