When oboist Russ de Luna asked whether the audience members at Davies Symphony Hall had ever heard any music by Arnold Bax, few hands went up. In the composer’s defense, not everyone heard the question.
Bax, an English composer who was at his best in the 1920s, wrote seven symphonies and more than a dozen tone poems, none of which you’re likely to hear in concert. That’s not to say his music isn’t interesting, only that its idiom — not quite romantic, not quite modern, sometimes Celtic-flavored — was out of step with his contemporaries. With so many great symphonies to play, it’s understandable that his have fallen out of fashion.
But the chamber music series at Davies affords San Francisco Symphony musicians an opportunity to experiment on a small scale, to revel in music that composers wrote thinking not about prizes or international acclaim but about people. And whenever a dozen orchestra members come together, as they did on Sunday, Jan. 26, they always present a strong case for whatever’s on the program.
We owe Bax’s Oboe Quintet (1922) to its dedicatee, Léon Goossens, a virtuoso who inspired a flowering of oboe literature throughout England in the 20th century. In the unfurling lines of the opening (so like Claude Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) and in recitative-like cadenzas later in the piece, de Luna had plenty of moments to shine. It didn’t hurt that violinists Dan Carlson and Florin Parvulescu, violist Leonid Plashinov-Johnson, and cellist Davis You were always sensitive to the balance.
Listening to the way that Bax orchestrates the slow movement’s long-breathed melodies — the way he chooses just the right moment to shift a line from the second violin to the viola, where it can soar — it’s clear that this composer knew how to write for the whole group. Everyone joins in on the finale, a rollicking jig with a pinch of pathos.
On vacation in the Italian Riviera, Camille Saint-Saëns dashed off his Fantaisie, Op. 124 (1907), a diaphanous assemblage of episodes dedicated to a violin-and-harp sister duo. The flute transcription, which Yubeen Kim and harpist Katherine Siochi performed, necessitates a few register changes that can’t help but disrupt some of the lines. Yet other passages fare better in this version. It’s certainly more virtuosic: Siochi deftly covered the lost violin double stops, and Kim’s pinpoint staccato more than made up for the ricochet bowing in the original. Throughout, the duo’s refined approach complemented the delicate style that the composer increasingly adopted in his twilight years.
Later in his career, Benjamin Britten would be lauded for writing dignified music for children and amateurs, but in 1929, he and his friends were those children. Two Pieces for Violin, Viola, and Piano premiered at Britten’s boarding school when he was still a boy (and was only published in 2013). The second piece, with its play of odd-numbered rhythmic groupings against a plucked ostinato, bears hints of the mature composer. But the searching first piece represents an earnest attempt at the latest post-tonal styles to come out of Vienna — a model Britten would soon leave behind. Still, this is an accomplished work for a 16-year-old, and with some zhuzhing from the ensemble (Carlson, Plashinov-Johnson, and pianist Marc Shapiro), it was enjoyable to hear.
The revelation of Sunday’s program was a second student work: the Clarinet Quintet from 1895 by Black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who then had only a few works under his belt but took a stab at his teacher’s challenge — would it be possible to write a clarinet quintet not influenced by Brahms?
Well, no. This music’s arcing lines and more than a few of its voicings owe a debt to the elder composer, while its folksiness echoes Antonín Dvořák. Still, Coleridge-Taylor’s quintet is an imaginative and well-crafted piece, with an especially effective slow movement, a tender song that reaches its apex in a pouring out from the clarinet, played here by Yuhsin Galaxy Su, prettily decorated by first violinist Polina Sedukh’s filigree. Violinist Olivia Chen, violist Katarzyna Bryla, and cellist Sébastien Gingras rounded out the ensemble.
Perhaps most creative is the finale, with its surging unisons, skipping rhythms, and dreamlike diversion in the coda before a triumphant ending. Overheard on the street after the performance: “Why don’t we hear this one more often?”
