by Kevin McLaughlin
“Finding Resonance,” ChamberFest Cleveland’s program on June 12 at Harkness Chapel began ferociously, grew wilder, then deepened into passion.
The connection between the concerts in this summer’s series, Continental Drifts, is sometimes contrived, but a group of exciting and well-made pieces provided much to write home about. And Kevin McBrien’s pre-concert remarks provided useful bearings for the evening.
Jörg Widmann’s 180 beats per minute made for a bracing opener. The music has a Rite of Spring-like brutality with its stamping pulse, sudden shocks, and disciplined convulsion. Violinists Kerson Leong and Diana Cohen, violists Njord Fossnes and Pearl de la Motte, and cellists Raman Ramakrishnan and Bryan Cheng, played with fierce precision. They made the tempo feel dangerous rather than merely fast.
Improbably, George Enescu’s Violin Sonata No. 3 in A minor, pushed pulse and temperature even higher. Subtitled “dans le caractère populaire roumain,” the sonata is more than concert music in folk dress. Enescu shapes a private language from bends, ornaments, drones, irregular accents, and speech-like phrases, and violinist Blake Pouliot and pianist Evren Ozel made it sound spontaneous and personal, although the score is precisely notated.
Pouliot summoned something otherworldly from his violin, with a dusky low register, sweeping slides, quarter-tone moans, and folk-inflected frenzy. At times his playing sounded almost possessed.
Ozel kept up with Pouliot as if that were easy to do. In the finale, dance entered the picture, but Enescu’s dance is too strange and flexible to be harnessed into regular patterns for long. Pouliot and Ozel let the rhythms dart, sing, and curl back on themselves.
After intermission came Anton Arensky’s Piano Trio in D minor Written in 1894, the trio breaks away from the Russian nationalist school and turns toward Tchaikovsky’s international style. Dedicated to the memory of the Russian cellist Karl Davydov, the piece gives the cello much of its emotional weight and many of its best melodies.
Pianist Juho Pohjonen, violinist Diana Cohen, and cellist Bryan Cheng gave the opening Allegro moderato a broad, ardent sweep. Cohen let its main theme unfold warmly, and later the music tightened in turbulent passages. The Scherzo provided a welcome lift with its waltz-like sway, scampering figures, and quick exchanges.
In the Elegia, Cheng’s cello line carried the memorial weight with eloquent restraint and warm sonority, giving the low opening theme gravity, not tears. Cohen answered in a clear, vocal upper range, while Pohjonen relished the storminess of the piano part.
The finale restored momentum without hardening the music’s emotional grain. Pohjonen, Cohen, and Cheng brought Arensky’s trio home with breadth, urgency, and brilliance — qualities that had marked the evening’s music from its first ferocious measures.
Published on ClevelandClassical.com June 19, 2026
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