Curtis Institute's Sejong Music Festival

One of my pet complaints for the past two decades has been the summer gap in the Philadelphia music schedule. During the very months when Center City Philadelphia attracts tourists from every quadrant of the globe, one of our major cultural strengths vanishes from the city event listings.

I realize most of the people who visit Independence Hall aren't interested in string quartets and piano trios. But some are. Many foreign visitors hail from countries where music appreciation is considered a normal attribute of educated adults.

This summer the Curtis Institute seems to be doing its bit to fill the gap. While its students and faculty are performing in summer festivals all over the world, Curtis has opened its own facilities to three workshops that include public chamber music concerts.

World-class workshops

In June, Curtis hosted a workshop for young musicians that presented concerts by students and a faculty that included the flutist Mimi Stillman and leading members of the Philadelphia Orchestra. At the end of July, Field Hall provided a world-class venue for the first Young Pianist's Academy, a series of concerts and master classes that ended with a concert in which one of Philadelphia's brightest local lights, Charles Abramovic, joined selected students in a program featuring several new pieces by Philadelphia composers.

And last weekend Curtis hosted the second half of the first International Sejong Music Festival, a unique bi-continental Korean-American event organized by a Curtis faculty member, the violist Hsin-Yuan Huang.

Ms. Huang's festival opens with a session in Korea in February and concludes with a second installment at Curtis in the summer. It's organized as a workshop for exceptional young musicians, but, like the other two events I mentioned above, it also includes chamber concerts that provide a welcome relief from the summer doldrums. Most of the faculty members are Curtis grads, with the posts divided among Koreans and Americans in a way that would please any State Department official interested in fostering Korean-U.S. relations.

Diaz plays Beethoven

The Sejong Festival's final concert opened with the president of Curtis, Roberto Diaz, playing the viola part in a Beethoven string trio that teamed him with two Korean musicians with international credentials: violinist Jun Young Baek and cellist Kang Ho Lee. Opus 9, No. 1 is one of the charmers in Beethoven's output, and Diaz and his younger colleagues squeezed the maximum out of passages like the sweet violin melody in the adagio. The trio is a conversational piece, with courtly exchanges between the violin and the viola, and Baek and Diaz underlined that quality by playing standing up.

The evening's high point for me was one of Shostakovich's best known pieces, the piano quintet in G minor, with pianists Robert MacDonald and cellist Peter Stumpf representing the American connection, Baek and Korean-American Jane Kim on first and second violins, and Huang herself on viola.

This was one of the most understanding performances of the quintet I've heard. The three great slow movements captured all of the sad, elegiac beauty you hear in Shostakovich's best adagios and lentos.

In the wrong hands, the scherzo and the final allegro can sound conventional and even schmaltzy. The five musicians in charge of this reading permeated them with the sarcasm that runs through much of Shostakovich's work. These happier, more triumphant sections seem out of place if you don't hear the composer telling us that he included them because they're demanded by tradition and his true feelings can be heard in the other movements.

Lightweight Schumann

The program's second half revisited the sunnier, unconflicted mood of the Beethoven trio. Huang and MacDonald played four short pieces on fairy tale themes by Schumann— pleasant pieces that provided a showcase for Huang but shouldn't be played as a group, one after the other. They'd probably work better as encore pieces or interludes between weightier works.

The evening ended with the string sextet that Brahms wrote when he appeared to be enjoying a reasonably happy love affair. The Brahms introduced some new faces. Violinist Kyung Sun Lee, violist Sang Jin Kim and cellist Kang Ho Lee joined Kim, Diaz and Stumpf. The quintet was something of an anti-climax after the depth and inner conflict of the Shostakovich but it ended the concert with a performance notable for its melody, bustle and controlled drive.

The program attracted a full house to Curtis's tasteful new Gould Rehearsal Hall, which provides a spacious setting for a chamber concert.

Concert organizers, please note: There is an audience for summertime music in the heart of Philadelphia. The Rittenhouse Square area provides a setting for a summer music festival that's just as charming as the bucolic environs traditionally associated with vacation-time musical offerings.