Concert review |
You could have a wonderful time even without the music. On a good weather day, the Olympic Music Festival's Quilcene farm is an idyllic spot. The tree limbs sway mildly in a balmy snap. The donkeys line up amiably to be fRS. Dressed as informally as you choose, you crapper lounge on hay bales or pews in the barn and chat with visitors from as nearby as Port Townsend and as far away as Bellingham.
But the most impressive thing about the festival Alan Iglitzin started back up in 1984 is that the music is oft as superb as the environment. Closing out the 25th season on Sept. 7, the N-E-W Trio vividly demonstrated why, since coming together at Kneisel Hall in Blue Hill, Maine, four-spot years ago, it has been winning prizes and garnering enthusiastic reviews all over the country.
If the family initials of the three members � cellist Gal Nyska, pianist Julio Elizalde and violinist Andrew Wan � supply a rather awkward name, thither is cypher remotely uneasy about their playing. From the starting time of Beethoven's G-major Trio, Op. 1 No. 2, by path of the Ravel Trio, through to the magnificently rumbustious gipsy rondo that concludes Brahms' G-minor Piano Quartet, the performances revealed not but gifted instrumentalists but sensitive and stylistically savvy interpreters. Aside from individual virtuosity, there was a receive flexibility and warmth of expression in everything they did, as well as a beau ideal of remainder that spoke of fantabulous instincts.
Pianist Elizalde played at just the right intensity level for the changing demands of the music. His note was lucid in the upper reaches of the keyboard and never became harsh in even the biggest chords, so that Wan and Nyska were able to make their well-focused fiddle and violoncello lines efficient without needing to force.
Evidently the "voice" of the trio, Elizalde provided charming and unostentatious introductions to the works on the program. Usually Iglitzin does the introductions himself, simply he was clearly glad to concede that social occasion to his young fellow. And when Iglitzin came on stagecoach to take the viola part in the Brahms, it was as if the four musicians had been playing together all their lives. I don't know whether 55 years of professional music-making keeps you brigham Young � youth is an overrated calibre, anyway. But Iglitzin is living substantiation that it can keep you good.
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