In Rockport, glimpses of a future
The Rockport Chamber Music Festival, now in its 27th season, seems to have an extra spring in its step these days. Concerts are well-attended, the artistic level appears to be high, and momentum is building toward the construction of the festival's new performance center scheduled to open in June 2010. A lawsuit over zoning that had threatened to derail the project has been settled, and work is scheduled to commence in October.
On Sunday afternoon, before the scheduled performance by the Daedalus Quartet, curious passersby were invited to view the site of the future Main Street concert space overlooking Sandy Bay. The new hall will seat 330 - that's 90 more than the current venue at the Rockport Art Association - and the festival plans to expand its season, which, interestingly, could force it to compete for audiences with a wide range of festivals that start up in the month of July.
Still, while organizers were eager to discuss their ambitious future plans, Sunday's program had a more immediate agenda: the music of Haydn, Shostakovich, and Elgar, delivered by an up-and-coming string quartet. Founded in 2000, the Daedalus has held a coveted residency at Lincoln Center's Chamber Music Society Two, and this summer it is making the rounds to summer chamber music destinations in New York and New England.
Its Rockport program, the second of two, took some time to hit its stride. Haydn's Quartet Op. 20, No. 1 was full of clear and sure-footed playing in the outer movements, but more distinctive character was needed to bring Haydn's signature wit and charm to the surface. Still, a warm-toned and richly drawn slow movement hinted at the expressive resources this capable group has within its reach.
Any doubts about those resources were put to rest by a hair-raising rendition of Shostakovich's Third Quartet. The group - with sibling violinists Kyu-Young Kim and Min-Young Kim, violist Jessica Thompson, and cellist Raman Ramakrishnan - dispensed both finesse and fury in the right proportions, and showed an intuitive feel for Shostakovich's idiom, with its acid sarcasm, its tongue-in-cheek banality, and its explosive outbursts of emotion. Many groups excel at this music's expressive extremes, but the Daedalus also did a fine job tracing moments of ambiguity, in which certain instrumental lines or dance figures hover in a strange, multivalent netherworld somewhere far beyond tragedy and farce.
The evening ended with a big-boned, big-hearted performance of Elgar's Piano Quintet, with Judith Gordon as the sensitive guest pianist. This unusually textured three-movement work is somewhat of a rarity on concert programs, but these players were equal to its demands, both in its surging stormy passages and its many moments of swelling, sighing lyricism. The work was completed just after World War I, yet there is something poignant in the way the music seems to cling to an older tradition of 19th-century Romantic chamber music, as if the world that tradition described could live forever, as if it had not already disappeared.
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.
