Curtis Institute of Music's 'Summerfest'

Surprises and novelties

Tower’s “Big Sky” may be saddled with a dumb title, but it’s a classic example of the color and emotion composers tend to pour into the trio for piano, violin, and cello. Its 420 seconds include a beautiful cello song and surprises like a passage that pairs the cello with a tinkling piano.

Summerfest is primarily an educational program, with classes and coaching for musicians at all levels, and this event showcased faculty members and alumni playing a parade of novelties that combined Tower’s lighthearted tone with first-class music.

The sole standard piece on the program was the evening’s opener, Bach’s toccata and fugue. The only dud, for me, was Elliot Carter’s “Au Quai” for bassoon and viola. Carter’s highly individualistic music generally feels strong and meaningful, but this item drew a complete blank. It didn’t say anything to me, and I don’t have anything to say about it.

Organist Patrick Kreeger followed the Bach with an organ sonata by Robert Elmore, a Philadelphia composer and organ virtuoso who taught at the University of Pennsylvania and served as organist for Holy Trinity church on Rittenhouse Square from 1938 to 1955. Elmore’s sonata opens with a moody prelude on the chorale, “Herzliebster Jesu (Ah, Holy Jesus),” and ends in a huge, triumphant celebration, with bright trumpets accenting big whirlwinds of sound. Elmore played for silent movies in his youth, and the applause that followed the last note proved he had learned how to rouse an audience.

All about that bassoon

Franz Joseph Haydn’s employer, Prince Esterhazy, played an obsolete instrument called the baryton, so Haydn dutifully produced 175 pieces that modern musicians have to arrange for other instruments. For the trio played at this concert, bass player Heather Miller Lardin created a transcription for the unique combination of viola, bassoon, and double bass. The result was a beautiful example of Haydn’s good-natured musical inventiveness — a courtly dialogue between William Short’s bassoon and Toby Appel’s exceptionally sweet viola, with the transcriber maintaining the beat on her bass.

Flutist Mimi Stillman introduced a piece by French composer Charles-Marie Widor by noting he wrote it for French flutist Paul Taffanel, and that both men “are not household names but should be.” Taffanel is generally considered the founder of the modern French flute tradition; Widor was an influential composer and organist whose students included Albert Schweitzer and Darius Milhaud. Widor’s Divertimento for flute and piano supported Stillman’s contention with four wide-ranging movements, including a romance with tangoish passages that leave you no doubt about the kind of romantic interlude the composer had in mind. Charles Abramovic contributed an exceptionally sensitive, beautifully nuanced piano part.

Bassoonist William Short performed in half the pieces on the program and he introduced all of them by saying, “Now for something different.” The Paganini piece that ended the concert looked like it was originally written for some other combination of instruments but Paganini did indeed compose it for horn and bassoon with a piano or orchestral accompaniment. It ended the evening with an appropriate touch of comedy as the horn and the bassoon engaged in another courtly conversation with the piano interrupting and eventually getting the last word.