Great Barrington — I should say at the outset that I like the Close Encounters With Music Series exceedingly. The musicians whom artistic director Yehuda Hanani gets together are first rate, so much so that many of the marquee soloists whom the BSO pays big money to get to Tanglewood in the summertime are absolutely put to shame by them. Such was certainly the case Saturday evening for Close Encounters’ season finale at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington.
The superb duo of young musicians, Bulgarian violinist Bella Hirstova and Georgian pianist David Aladashivili joined Mr. Hanani for the musical centerpiece of Saturday evening , Brahms’ piano Trio in B Major, Opus 8. I also give a great deal of credit to Mr. Hanani for his sensible thematic programming, and I find his pre-concert talks to be both informative and charming. We need more music impresarios like Yehuda Hanani, and certainly more top-level instrumentalists like Ms. Hirstova, and Mr. Aladashivili in the limelight.
With all of this to coo over, what could be left to complain about? I will tell you. The concert organizers feel the need to amplify the sound produced on stage to more easily resonate throughout the Mahaiwe auditorium. As to whether this is strictly necessary, I am highly skeptical. While a student in Chicago, I attended chamber music concerts in a hall roughly equivalent in size to the Mahaiwe, and I never spotted either a microphone or a speaker there in my life. Nor did I ever get the impression that the music was being even subtly amplified. Of course, in the music Shed at Tanglewood, which is open on three sides to the outdoors, it is a different story. But there, at least, the amplification is subtle and tasteful. Even if one accepts that it is necessary to subtly amplify musical performances on the Mahaiwe stage, the amplification which Close Encounters uses is much too heavy-handed. In the last concert, I thought my comparatively small discomfort at this phenomenon was due to my sitting so close to the speaker placed just off stage right. But this time I was seated further back in the orchestra, and the problem actually seemed much worse. Perhaps the musicians were simply too good, their sound too big for the sound system to take. If so, it would be a bitter irony for Mr. Hanani and Close Encounters, who put such a marvelous season finale together.
And it was indeed marvelous. True, there was no real point to the first, minute-long appearance of the David Parson’s dancers to accompany the C major Haydn Minuet and Variations in C for the cello, and what Renaissance costumes have to do with German classicism I am not quite sure. But Bela Bartok’s Romanian Dances for Violin and Piano, especially as rendered with such force and depth of tone as Ms. Hirstova gave us, really brought out the best in this Hungarian modernist, something genuinely folkloric and impetuous, rather than a mere exercise in the new, the weird, and the daring. Mr. Aladashvili’s account of Chopin’s “Heroic” Polonaise had such fire that one could forgive the occasional garbled notes, pretty much inevitable in any performance of this type of showpiece. It was also very agreeable to hear Mr. Aladashvili play the piano transcription of the Ritual Fire Dance from the very much underrated Spanish composer Manuel de Falla’s ballet el amor brujo. I found the Parson Dancers’ choreographic setting to Astor Piazzolla’s Grand Tango utterly delightful, a classically rooted pas de deux with a very modern tinge, which only become a proper partner-dancing tango at the work’s climax.
This brought us to the second half of the program, and to the Brahms Trio, in which the sound engineering really became apparent. To be fair, this is very early Brahms, and the composer clearly had yet to hone his craft. The themes, particularly the languid melody that opens the piece and the material that brings us home in a rollicking finale in movement four, are first rate. But, oddly for later Brahms, his themes are better than his use of them. The writing and scoring for this trio of instruments makes one think of Tchaikovsky’s initial scorn for that instrument combination when asked by his patron to write for it. Where the music is mellow, Brahms’ natural good taste in melody and harmonic acuity shine through.
However, if it were up to me, I would advise their getting rid of electronic amplification all together. It would be an awful shame if they didn’t, because, really, the Close Encounters With Music chamber music series is a living embodiment of all the right ways to present classical music.
