The Red Rocks Music Festival held its second and third concerts of the fall season on Friday and Sunday, Oct. 6 and 8, impressing Sedona audiences with not one but two remarkable chamber groups.
Viano String Quartet
Friday’s performance featured the Viano String Quartet, composed of violinists Lucy Wang and Hao Zhou, violist Aiden Kane and cellist Tate Zawadiuk. The quartet’s seamless technique was on display from the first notes of Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No. 12, the “Quartettsatz” or “quartet movement,” one of Schubert’s many incomplete works that also gave Zhou an immediate chance to show off his impressive agility as first violin.
Wang took over the role of first violin for the second movement of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No. 1, marked andante cantabile. She displayed a remarkable intimacy with her instrument that contributed to the warmth and comfort of the piece. Its growing folksiness as the role of the cello expanded could perhaps be understood as implying an American influence, but actually hinted at something more important than that — at the once-widespread culture of small groups playing string instruments for their neighbors, which was the foundation of modern chamber and orchestral performance. Tchaikovsky, in this case, was writing music for muzhiks, laden with overtones of lazy smoke rising from the chimneys of stone cottages through the fall of autumn leaves. When the quartet finished, instead of immediate applause, one member of the audience sighed in contentment.
For variety, Antonin Dvorak’s “Humoresque” was next on the program, stormy and striving with the four instruments chasing after one another with more and more power, led by the first violin, who remained firmly in control of the group’s vigor.
Then the quartet decided to introduce an unannounced selection prior to intermission: Kevin Lau’s brand-new String Quartet No. 5, “The Train to Improbable Places.” A rapid succession of themes followed its early acceleration, along with novel snippets of writing for the individual instruments, the steady beat of heard-but-unseen wheels, icicle-like high notes from Zhou’s violin and flashes of fire from Kane’s viola. It was not just fast but frenzied music, requiring tremendous skill to reveal its structure.
“This is amazing,” one listener, who had left New York at three in the morning local time to attend the performance, said after the quartet finished. “It was worth it.”
The second half of the concert opened with Astor Piazzolla’s “Introduccion al Angel,” a more dramatic work. First came the cello alone on the stage, plucking single notes, to be slowly joined by the viola from the back of the room and then Zhou’s violin in woody-brown tones, with Wang adding accents like slaps and screeches. Then the foursome came together and blasted off before having a prolonged, Sherlock Holmes-like musical conversation about the lamentable absence of abstruse cryptograms in their lives.
For their big finish, the quartet chose Bedrich Smetana’s String Quartet No. 1, “From My Life,” and Kane had a few words to say about it first.
“Smetana, in his wisdom, realized finally at the end of his life that the viola was in fact the greatest instrument,” Kane told her listeners. “So he wrote for us a viola concerto and hid it under the guise of a string quartet.”
Her remarks may have been prompted by her colleague’s viola jokes.
“Why are a violist’s fingers like lightning?” Zhou asked the audience. “Because they never strike the same place twice.”
Kane gave a truly marvelous handling of the quartet’s gentle early tones that softened the edge of a force capable of reaching out and grabbing her listeners. A steady, pulsing bass line flowed beneath the violins and served as a reminder of the amount of feeling that Smetana was able to compress into his compositions, as well as anticipating the minimalism of John Adams. The second movement was either a homage to, or a joke about, Mozart that grew increasingly Viennese boulevardier by its close.
The third movement, marked largo sostenuto, alternated between passion and gentleness and drew the audience into breathing in time with the players with its subtle power. Even their vibrato was perfectly synchronized. As for the final passage, it started out jolly and exuberant before shifting rapidly to angst, pessimism and resignation.
Asked for an encore, the quartet obliged with Zhou’s arrangement of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” which turned out to be blisteringly frisky and playful, incorporating a capella vocals and hints of bluegrass. Zhou described it with a laugh as “Viano barbershop.”
Mill Avenue Chamber Players
Sedona’s music lovers were spoiled with a second concert on Sunday afternoon featuring the Mill Avenue Chamber Players, a woodwind quintet direct from Tempe in its 16th season. The performance was preceded by a brief exhibition by Sedona Dance Academy students Sofia Wolf and Phoebe Jones under the direction of Jessica Phillips.
Joining founder Rose French on French horn, Thomas Breadon on bassoon, Monica Anthony on flute and Nikolaus Flickinger on oboe and cor anglais was clarinetist Johnathan Robinson, the group’s newest member, making his debut as an official member of the ensemble.
“This is the most musically rewarding thing we do,” French said.
The players had selected two movements from Breadon’s “Impressions” suite, which the composer mentioned had been inspired by his mother and grandmother, to open their performance. The first movement was notable for a degree of well-chosen sweetness that ended too soon and left the listener wanting more. By contrast, the fourth movement, a nocturne, was more sedate, almost mournful, and dominated by the clarinet and oboe.
The bouncy jazz of Kenji Bunch’s “Shout Chorus” succeeded Breadon’s calmer stylings. New musical ideas kept sprouting out of each other as the work progressed, with the clarinet and flute getting all throaty and intimate together. It was also a workout for the musicians. “After that, I’m ready for a drink!” French declared.
Next came Amy Beach’s “Pastoral for Woodwind Quintet,” richly-colored and melting, with the horn supporting the woodwinds like a pressure wave beneath sunset clouds. The quintet then took their listeners on an amble through the countryside of the last century with William Grant Still’s “Miniatures for Woodwind Quintet,” an amble that picked up the pace in the jaunty second movement, turned into a rolling, tipsy lurch in the third after a stop at the neighborhood speakeasy, rested against a stile in the fourth and was back to a cheery stride by the fifth and final movement.
Last on the afternoon’s program was Arturo Marquez’s “Danza de Melodia,” a twisty piece that took time to turn its complexity into energy, with instruments dropping out and then coming back in before winding their way to a brisk finish.
After 22 years of staging concerts at the Sedona Creative Life Center, festival founder Moshe Bukshpan also announced on Friday that they will no longer be able to present shows at SCLC, forcing a last-minute move to the Sedonya Conscious Living Center, where the festival’s remaining concerts will be offered, except for the final show, which will take place at the Sedona Performing Arts Center.
“They’re very accommodating here,” Bukshpan said of the Sedonya staff.
The next concert in the Red Rocks Music Festival’s fall series took place at 3 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 14, with an appearance by composer David Amram, who performed a selection of his own works. The final concert, on Nov. 11, will treat listeners to the skill of acclaimed violinist Shlomo Mintz.
