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Dan Coren
A feast from the Chamber Music Society:
Brahms (and the rest of us) would be pleased
DAN COREN
In Cimarron, a little town in northeast New Mexico, the only place to have dinner is the dining room of the Saint James Hotel, an establishment best known for the Wild West gunfighters who stayed and sometimes shot each other there. Luckily for my wife and me, since we stayed in Cimarron for two nights at the end of August en route from Colorado to Santa Fe, the restaurant happens to be excellent.
It’s not the sort of place where you’d expect to find classical chamber music; the bar adjoining the dining room is well-populated with local outdoor types, and the ambient noise is pretty loud. Nevertheless, I swore that the background music for piano and strings that I was just barely able to make out was Brahms.
When our steaks arrived, I couldn’t resist asking the hostess, a heartily friendly gray-haired woman who looked to be about 60, what music was playing, not really expecting an answer. Her eyes lit up and she said, “Let me show you the disc.” She returned shortly with a two-disc set of the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson trio playing Brahms and Mendelssohn. “They played here at the Presbyterian church last summer,” she explained. “They were just wonderful! This is the Brahms we’re listening to.”
If only Brahms, so consumed with self-criticism and doubt about the worth of his music, could have known that more than a century later, his B minor Piano Trio— a work he labored over with intensity unusual even for him— would be treasured in a tiny community at the western edge of America’s Great Plains, and that some of the world’s best musicians had traveled there to play it.
Today I received in the mail the brochure for the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society and found that the same group will play the same piece at the Independence Seaport Museum on Sunday March 3rd. In fact, if you set your browser to pcmsconcerts.org, you’ll find spread out before you on this marvelously designed site a musical feast unlike any I’ve ever seen in my many years in Philadelphia.
In recent years, PMCS flourished by offering top-rate chamber music concerts at reasonable prices, but this season they’ve outdone themselves: The season offers some 60 concerts at nine different venues. If you like classical music at all, there’s something here for you: some jazz, some contemporary music, even an all-Beethoven program by the Curtis Chamber Orchestra, but mostly superstar chamber music groups and soloists performing masterpieces from the heart of the classical chamber music repertory. And not a single ticket is priced above $22.
Here are the concerts I immediately scarfed up: Mitsuko Uchida playing the Mozart G minor Piano Quartet and the Schumann Opus 44 Piano Quintet with the Brentano Quartet on November 9th; and Peter Serkin playing, among other things, Schoenberg’s Opus 11, Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, a work by Elliot Carter, and the Beethoven “Hammerklavier” Sonata on December 12th (omigosh, is he really going to do all that?).
The Philadelphia Orchestra reminds me of a legacy airline competing against Southwest and Frontier. The Orchestra is currently struggling to win back its lost subscribers by letting them pick whatever concerts they want at what— by the Orchestra’s standards— are substantial discounts (they made me an offer of three concerts that I couldn’t refuse). But the Orchestra can’t come close to meeting PCMS’s prices or to offering its richness of repertory. And the Orchestra won’t be playing anytime soon in Cimarron.
Brahms (and the rest of us) would be pleased
DAN COREN
In Cimarron, a little town in northeast New Mexico, the only place to have dinner is the dining room of the Saint James Hotel, an establishment best known for the Wild West gunfighters who stayed and sometimes shot each other there. Luckily for my wife and me, since we stayed in Cimarron for two nights at the end of August en route from Colorado to Santa Fe, the restaurant happens to be excellent.
It’s not the sort of place where you’d expect to find classical chamber music; the bar adjoining the dining room is well-populated with local outdoor types, and the ambient noise is pretty loud. Nevertheless, I swore that the background music for piano and strings that I was just barely able to make out was Brahms.
When our steaks arrived, I couldn’t resist asking the hostess, a heartily friendly gray-haired woman who looked to be about 60, what music was playing, not really expecting an answer. Her eyes lit up and she said, “Let me show you the disc.” She returned shortly with a two-disc set of the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson trio playing Brahms and Mendelssohn. “They played here at the Presbyterian church last summer,” she explained. “They were just wonderful! This is the Brahms we’re listening to.”
If only Brahms, so consumed with self-criticism and doubt about the worth of his music, could have known that more than a century later, his B minor Piano Trio— a work he labored over with intensity unusual even for him— would be treasured in a tiny community at the western edge of America’s Great Plains, and that some of the world’s best musicians had traveled there to play it.
Today I received in the mail the brochure for the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society and found that the same group will play the same piece at the Independence Seaport Museum on Sunday March 3rd. In fact, if you set your browser to pcmsconcerts.org, you’ll find spread out before you on this marvelously designed site a musical feast unlike any I’ve ever seen in my many years in Philadelphia.
In recent years, PMCS flourished by offering top-rate chamber music concerts at reasonable prices, but this season they’ve outdone themselves: The season offers some 60 concerts at nine different venues. If you like classical music at all, there’s something here for you: some jazz, some contemporary music, even an all-Beethoven program by the Curtis Chamber Orchestra, but mostly superstar chamber music groups and soloists performing masterpieces from the heart of the classical chamber music repertory. And not a single ticket is priced above $22.
Here are the concerts I immediately scarfed up: Mitsuko Uchida playing the Mozart G minor Piano Quartet and the Schumann Opus 44 Piano Quintet with the Brentano Quartet on November 9th; and Peter Serkin playing, among other things, Schoenberg’s Opus 11, Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, a work by Elliot Carter, and the Beethoven “Hammerklavier” Sonata on December 12th (omigosh, is he really going to do all that?).
The Philadelphia Orchestra reminds me of a legacy airline competing against Southwest and Frontier. The Orchestra is currently struggling to win back its lost subscribers by letting them pick whatever concerts they want at what— by the Orchestra’s standards— are substantial discounts (they made me an offer of three concerts that I couldn’t refuse). But the Orchestra can’t come close to meeting PCMS’s prices or to offering its richness of repertory. And the Orchestra won’t be playing anytime soon in Cimarron.
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