Review of concert

The Concordia String Trio

Saturday, April 1, 2006, 7:30 PM
St. Clements Shrine, Boston, MA

Consisting of players based in the Midwest, the Concordia String Trio decided to head east and strut their stuff before a Beantown audience. They have plenty to be proud of, too, as their first-rate concert was a real winner.

The three recent items on the program were Boston premieres. String Trio No. 1: Zazen by David Colson consists of five relatively brief character movements that take their inspiration from Buddhist concepts. Eccentric, even lopsided in feel, the piece shouldn't work -- yet somehow it does, in part because ideas are crystal clear and instrumental colors are felicitous and striking. And lurking behind it all is a friendly musical personality that sees everything with a twinkle in its eye and a wry, knowing grin.

Andrew List co-opts the dissonant Neoclassic idiom favored by Piston and Copland for his trio Serenade for Margo without playing the parrot. True to this genre, its textures never become sludgy or overwrought, yet there's significant depth and energy underscoring its genial, good-natured speech. And its tripartite structure is clearly articulated, easily able to accommodate several modest excursions that further develop material. This is how low-key music should sound.

John McDonald's Six Poems of Paul Celan for Piano Quartet is a recent rescoring of his earlier setting of this writer's verse for soprano and small ensemble. Happily, one cannot readily ascertain its origins as a vocal piece, the work seeming as if it were always meant for piano quartet. And music in McDonald's portfolio never gets more Expressionist than this; raw and highly-charged, this could be a soundtrack to the scariest nightmare one can conjure up. Yet there's no obvious kinship here to older models -- this anguish is McDonald's alone.

Closing the evening was the A Minor String Trio of Max Reger. Despite an early 20th-century composition date, this is ripe late Romantic stuff through and through. The piece regrettably has its share of problems: material does not flow cogently, and harmonies twist strangely like those of Richard Strauss while not progressing convincingly. Unlike string quartets, though, string trios cannot afford to be repertoire snobs. One could do worse.

Performances were excellent. Marcia Henry Liebenow (violin), Leslie Perna (viola), and Darry Dolezal (cello) made a fine chamber music mix; their ensemble sound meshed as smoothly as a set of perfectly calibrated gears. Intonation here was spot on. And none of this precluded top-quality individual efforts -- all three executed exposed passages with confidence and cleanliness. The always-reliable Mr. McDonald provided a typically impeccable keyboard effort to the proceedings.

--David Cleary