by Kevin McLaughlin
The Cleveland Chamber Music Society opened its 77th season on Wednesday, September 9, to a large and lively house at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium.
The headliners were three distinguished Cleveland musicians — Cleveland Orchestra concertmaster Joel Link, principal horn Nathaniel Silberschlag, and pianist Dawoon Chung — and a program of works by Reinhold Glière, Gabriel Fauré, and Johannes Brahms.
Silberschlag and Chung began with four selections from Ukrainian-born Glière’s Op. 35. Written in 1908, they appear curiously older, with little obvious Russian color. At times they sound as though they belong to an earlier Central European salon tradition — especially the old-world sway of the Valse triste and the broad, songful lines of the Nocturne and Intermezzo. The latter were written for horn, while the Romance and Valse triste began as clarinet pieces.
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Robert Schumann wrote his three string quartets in a span of less than two months during the summer of 1842. We think of such intensely productive times as manic, especially for Schumann, who is now thought to have suffered from bipolar disorder. But in some ways, the music of Op. 41 belies that.
On Tuesday, December 3 at 7:30 pm at Plymouth Church, the Dover Quartet will return to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society bearing a healthy, six-week-old piece of music by David Bruce alongside works by Britten and Brahms.
Since winning the grand prize and three special prizes at the 2013 Banff International String Quartet Competition, the Dover Quartet — Joel Link and Bryan Lee, violins, Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, viola, and Camden Shaw, cello — have quickly risen to the forefront of young, internationally touring string quartets. Following that 2013 breakthrough, the ensemble has added to their resume a Cleveland Quartet Award, a Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, and most recently an Avery Fisher Career Grant.