by Kevin McLaughlin
ChamberFest Cleveland’s June 27 program, Inventions of Memory, offered three distinct meditations on musical remembrance. Presented in the tranquil setting of Harkness Chapel at Case Western Reserve University, eight of the festival’s standout artists illuminated works by Claude Debussy, Brett Dean, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
The program opened with Debussy’s Trois Chansons de Bilitis, a cycle of idealized and slightly prurient visions of antiquity. Mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron and pianist Roman Rabinovich offered a reading attuned to the music’s erotic undertow and bathed in Lydian and whole-tone harmonies.
In La Flûte de Pan, Rabinovich’s shimmering textures evoked the strumming of a lyre as Barron spun out the tale of a young girl’s intimate flute lesson. Her voice, pliant and sumptuous, moved easily between innocence and seduction. La Chevelure opened with a searching piano line that gave way to vocal reverie in Barron’s smokiest lower register. The cycle closed with Le Tombeau des naïades, a frostbitten elegy that replaced summer sensuality with wintry loss. Here, Barron’s voice turned inward, haunted and still, evoking a mythic world where nymphs and satyrs are long gone and innocence is left behind.