Reviews

Featuring ad hoc ensembles of musicians drawn from far and wide, Chamber Music International concerts often leave one wanting better-seasoned interpretations. But Saturday evening's program of three romantic masterpieces was tautly timed and tuned, and there was real depth to the music-making.

But there was also an unwelcome tendency to turbo-charge Smetana, Brahms and Dohnányi fortes and fortissimos into Shostakovich and Bartók intensities. Or maybe these musicians, superb as they were, had gauged volumes and gestures to a 2,200-seat concert hall, not to Caruth Auditorium's mere 480 seats and lively acoustics.

(Actually, the sound would have been better with maybe half – not all – the adjustable acoustical shutters partly open, for less reverberation.)

From mezzo-forte down, the Brahms B-flat major String Sextet (Op. 18) got a glorious performance from violinists Nai-Yuan Hu and Philip Lewis, violists Paul Coletti and Susan Dubois and cellists Ko Iwasaki and Jungshin Lim Lewis. There was a wonderfully visceral feeling for phrase-shape, and for the music's need to breathe.

But overly forced fortes and fortissmos ill suited a composer who, at least past the early piano sonatas and First Piano Concerto, almost never shouts. Long after other composers were writing quadruple fortes, conservative Brahms found a simple fortissimo quite loud enough.

The Smetana Piano Trio was passionately served up by pianist Gustavo Romero, Mr. Hu and Ms. Lewis, but there was tenderness, too. Again, though, volume inflation was an issue.

Caruth's Yamaha piano can be made to sound musical. But Mr. Romero's often hard touch pushed it to a metallic edge, and in some loud passages brazen ugliness. Did no one hear this during rehearsals? And a couple of cello cameos emerged with oversize tone.

Mr. Hu, Mr. Coletti and Mr. Iwasaki displayed impressive technique and plenty of ardor in Ernst von Dohnányi's C major Serenade for string trio. But the virtuoso music tended to be a little rushed, and a derailment prompted a restarting of the scherzo.

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