Revised SFS Chamber Music Still Delightful

Just as, this past Thursday, COVID-19 led to the replacement of the announced program by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) with a one-hour piano recital, there were major alterations in this afternoon’s Chamber Music Series concert. Once again a two-hour program was replaced by a one-hour offering without an intermission. The compositions by Jennifer Higdon and Frank Bridge were replaced by a far more modest offering, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 423 duo in G major. The remainder of the program was devoted entirely to the originally programmed D. 667 “Trout” quintet in A major by Franz Schubert.

While this program may have been foreshortened, it could not have been more engaging. K. 423 was performed by violinist Jessie Fellows and violist Katie Kadarauch, and there was an unmistakable freshness to their interpretation of the score. It is important to remember that, when Mozart played string quartets with his friends Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, Joseph Haydn, and Johann Baptist Wanhal, he played the viola part. He clearly believed that the viola should not be treated as an “accompanying” instrument, and K. 423 is very much a conversation between equals. Indeed, this music is rich with the wit of the exchanges between the two instruments; and both Fellows and Kadarauch knew full well how to let the attentive listener in on the jokes. The performance may have lasted for only about a quarter of an hour, but the brevity of it all was unmistakably the soul of wit.

There was also no shortage of wit in the playfulness of Schubert’s quintet. Pianist Yana Resnick was the “visiting artist,” performing with violinist David Chernyavsky, violist Yun Jie Liu, cellist Sébastien Gingras, and bassist Charles Chandler. (Here I must confess that all four of them are “personal favorites” that draw my attention during SFS performances.) What is particularly interesting is that, because each instrument has its own unique sonorities, Schubert engages in a wide variety of approaches to blending them. Some of those approaches are humorous, particularly when the bass is involved. Indeed, when the bass takes on the melody for its own variation of the “Trout theme” (from the D. 550 song), I have a lot of trouble not thinking of Elmer Fudd singing about catching a fish!

D. 667 is such a popular piece of chamber music that it almost demands that each performance provide its own individual take on the rhetorical stances that can be taken during execution. This afternoon’s ensemble had no difficulty finding delightfully unique stances for their interpretation of the quintet. Today’s approach to chamber music may have been more limited in duration than originally planned, but it could not have been more enjoyable.