LENOX — To understand the foundation of Boston Symphony Orchestra musicianship, you really need to see individual members of the orchestra performing chamber music. It’s the basis of everything they do. Whenever the full orchestra pulls off the impossible, it’s because these players first learned how to make magic in small groups.
So you have the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, an ensemble that includes the orchestra’s first-chair strings and winds — all amazing musicians. But you also have people like violinists Victor Romanul and Xin Ding, violist Daniel Getz, cellist Mickey Katz, and pianist Randall Hodgkinson, all of whom will appear at Tanglewood’s Linde Center Sunday, March 13, at 3 p.m., to perform a program of Montgomery, Shostakovich, and Sibelius. In addition to participating in Linde Center recitals, these same musicians turn up regularly in chamber music ensembles such as the West Stockbridge Chamber Players and in free community chamber concerts the BSO presents each year.
Sunday’s program starts with Jessie Montgomery’s three-movement piece “Duo for violin and cello.” The composer’s notes read: “This piece was written for my friend and cellist Adrienne Taylor … meant as an ode to friendship with movements characterizing laughter, compassion, adventure, and sometimes silliness.” She has titled those movements “Antics,” “In Confidence,” and “Serious Fun,” and she seems to have gotten them right.
If you view this performance of Montgomery’s piece, you will enjoy it all the more when you see it performed live, because you’ll have a good grasp of Montgomery’s expressive range. And if you know these players, you’ll recognize the parts they will most enjoy crushing. It’s a challenging piece.
If you have a basic familiarity with the works of Dmitri Shostakovich, then his “Five Pieces for Two Violins and Piano,” collected and arranged by Lev Atovmyan, will show you a side of the embattled composer that might surprise you. All of these selections are easy listening compared to the dark and angry tone of his late symphonies. But this is unsurprising when we consider that Shostakovich’s catalog of film and ballet music was the authorized source of Atovmyan’s arrangements. Dmitri knew how to write commercial music. File these pieces under “Shostakovich lite.”
The main event on Sunday is Jean Sibelius’ String Quartet in A minor, a piece with no opus number on account of the composer’s low opinion of it. This is one of the “other” Sibelius quartets, a group of pieces that have been nearly eclipsed by his most famous work in the genre, his quartet in D minor. Still, the least of Sibelius’ string quartets is worth a listen, and each of them sound like the work of a composer who was capable, early in his career, of speaking his mind unselfconsciously. He was only a student when he wrote the finale of the A minor quartet, but his alma mater named the school after him when they heard it and recognized his greatness. A member of the institute’s faculty wrote, “We paid attention when we realized that we were in the presence of something far beyond the ordinary pupil.”
According to BSO archives, Sibelius’ A minor quartet has been performed neither at Symphony Hall nor at Tanglewood. But a relatively short time has passed since all the parts became available: The score was incomplete until missing pages were discovered in 1990.
Tickets here.
