FORT WORTH — Some of the most enterprising chamber music programs around here happen each summer at the Mimir Chamber Music Festival. Now in its 22nd summer at Texas Christian University, the festival presents works you'd rarely hear elsewhere, as well as repertory staples. And performance standards scarcely suggest that these are ad hoc groups assembled just for the festival from major orchestras and conservatories.
Several of these musicians have been regulars over the years, and they double as faculty for a concentrated summer course for young chamber groups, who also perform. After Fort Worth, the festival moves to Australia, where co-founder and violinist Curt Thompson, formerly of the TCU faculty, heads the string program at the University of Melbourne Conservatorium.
Although unannounced, the influence of folk and popular music was threaded through this year's first two programs, at TCU's PepsiCo Recital Hall. The newest of the works, on Wednesday's opening concert, was American composer Gabriela Lena Frank's 2001 Leyandas: An Andean Walkabout. A former Fort Worth Symphony composer-in-residence, of mixed Peruvian, Lithuanian and Chinese heritage, Frank uses a string quartet to evoke traditional Andean flutes and guitars.
With extended string techniques — from familiar double-stops, high harmonics and pluckings to slides and percussive bow tappings — one could imagine this as music Bartók might have composed if he'd lived a century later and mined Peruvian rather than Central European folk idioms. Twenty-four minutes long, in six movements, it got a performance alternately earthy and eerie from violinists Thompson and Stephen Rose, violist Joan DerHovsepian and cellist Brant Taylor.
The Frank was prefaced by Ravel's jazz-influenced Violin Sonata, suavely played by violinist Jun Iwasaki and the occasionally over-aggressive pianist John Novacek. (Novacek sometimes got carried away in other pieces, too.)
Czech folk music is certainly in the DNA of the program's final work: Dvorák's A major Piano Quintet, a staple at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. This got much warmly expressive playing, but music from an age of horses and buggies also suffered some jet-propelled assaults that didn't ring true. Novacek, Rose, Iwasaki and DerHovsepian were joined by cellist Clancy Newman, whose first-movement tunes, with heavily throbbing vibrato, were overly assertive.
With the same five players, although this time with Iwasaki playing first violin, the Elgar Piano Quintet got the same mix of deeply felt eloquence and occasional overplaying. Especially in that sublime slow movement, a sort of Elgarian answer to those out-of-body slow movements in Beethoven's late string quartets, the music wanted a good deal more English reserve.
The best performance of the two nights — and it was a great one — was of the Prokofiev Second String Quartet. Based on folk tunes the composer heard in Russia's Caucasus mountains, this got playing that was alternately gutsy, reflective and pertly playful. Irresistible from start to finish — from Thompson, Rose, DerHovsepian and Taylor.
Opening the Friday concert, Mahler's one-movement A minor Piano Quartet was a student essay in overworked mini-motifs more than actual themes, with a piano part that relies too much on repeated chords. It can't be called great music, but its lovely late-romantic harmonies were lovingly dispensed by Novacek, Rose, DerHovsepian and Taylor.
Details
The Mimir Chamber Music Festival continues through July 12 at Texas Christian University's PepsiCo Recital Hall, 2800 S. University Drive, and the Renzo Piano Pavilion at the Kimbell Art Museum, 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd., both in Fort Worth. 1-817-984-9299, mimirfestival.org.
Formerly staff classical music critic of The Dallas Morning News, Scott Cantrell continues to cover the beat as a freelance writer. Classical music coverage at The News is supported in part by a grant from the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation. The News makes all editorial decisions.
