Thursday, October 30, 2008

Welcome

We are excited to preview The Independent Insider, a fun new step in the development of Kansas City's Weekly Journal of Society.We are pleased to offer you an interactive, up-to-date expression of Our Town, its people, its events and its arts. But this is just a taste of what's yet to come!In the coming weeks we will unveil an entirely new website, rich with the content and information you have come to expect from The Independent. But it isn't our printed version just placed online. No, this will have content you've never seen before on our pages, chock full of interesting tidbits, photos and of course those famous "I Wonders". We will have expanded coverage of all the Performing Arts in Kansas City, including reviews by our resident critic, Paul Horsley and Ann Slegman. Neighborhood pages to keep you up to date on what is happening in your neck of the woods, and two amazing calendars. One specifically for The Performing Arts, and the other for all the fun parties we cover. Each week you will find casual photos of people you know - or want to know - gracing our home page. These photos will change all the time! Every week when you come back, it will be a refreshing new look at Our Town. We are so excited by the planning and thought that have gone into this new endeavor, and can hardly wait to bring it to you! We are sure you will be pleased when it goes live on November 20th. Meanwhile, enjoy this small taste of what the future holds. If you would like to be notified via email when we post online information, sign up by emailing marie102@kcindependent.com . Marie will make sure you are included in our weekly email blast about what to expect that week in both the printed magazine and the online publication! Don't miss a single tidbit of news.

Come Back

Come Back. A mother and daughter's journey through hell and back,
by Claire Fontaine & Mia Fontaine

A true story about what it is really like to be a runaway teen who can't outrun her demons, and
the frantically determined mother's love that drags her back from the edge. Mia gives us a backstage pass to see her drug-induced travels and the subsequent boot camps that save her tortured life. Claire is a self-doubting, frightened uber-mother whose triumph is not a certain thing--until Mia decides she will Come Back.
An absolutely riveting glimpse into a anguished teenage mind, and the underworld of adolescent fugitives.

Joanna Glaze
Mom, Community Volunteer, Book Blogger

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

This Ain't Over... and it Should be in the Tank!

Historically speaking…..John McCain should not be in this race. He is being outspent 3 to 1. Barack Obama is an attractive, young, celebrity, and an amazingly gifted speaker. McCain is an old retread. He is not inspiring from the stump, and the president of his party is toxic. Astonishingly, the Pew Research Center reported Sunday that McCain is “finally receiving as much national media attention as his Democratic rival but it’s 60% negative.”

So why are the polls tightening when Obama-Biden should be walking away with it?

Perhaps “Joe-the-Plumber” hit a national nerve. It seems his “redistribute the wealth” language has the whole country talking. According to the most recent polls, men and women over 65 are turning to McCain-Palin, as are the independent voters.

Hang on. It’s going to be a wild ride. Keep your eye on www.realclearpolitics.com for the latest amalgam of the polls. If you can, vote today. The lines will be extraordinarily long next week.



Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Saturday, October 25, 2008

El Macho de la Mancha: Friends of Chamber Music brings Abraham, Savall for Don Quixote tribute

By Paul Horsley

On the face of it, it seems like a pretty straightforward task: seek out the many musical sources mentioned throughout Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, find them in contemporary sources, arrange them in a style-conscious manner and perform them in concert. Yet it took more than 400 years after the publication of the epic novel for someone to do just that.

On Friday at Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral, early-music polymath and gambist Jordi Savall brought a dozen or so musicians and actor F. Murray Abraham to present what is surely one of the most ingenious programs ever to grace a local stage. This concert version of Savall’s award-winning CD (on the Alia Vox Spain label) was the season-opener for the Friends of Chamber Music’s Early Music Series, and the huge church was packed to the rafters.
Don Quijote de la Mancha: Romances y Músicas was constructed by locating ballads and songs from the Quixote text, many of which are preserved in songbooks from the period, and presenting them either straight or in existing polyphonic settings. In cases where only text exists, Savall and his collaborators have located period tunes that closely match the poetry’s mood and scan.

Of course there was plenty of guesswork in creating this program, but it’s hard to imagine anyone today who is better-informed than Savall as to the repertoire and performance practice of early Spain.

To “set up” the songs, Abraham recited lead-in passages from the Cervantes text, in the witty, poignant, richly textured voice that made him so effective in Amadeus and other films. I was sitting pretty far back, and found myself wishing his microphone had been set a bit louder.

Accompanying the singers of La Capella Reial de Catalunya was Savall’s chamber orchestra Hespèrion XXI, a variegated array of gambas, guitar, double harp, winds, organ and percussion. Cervantes’ text sometimes specifies which instruments are playing, permitting another level of authenticity.

There is much sadness in Cervantes’ mad knight, and accordingly much of the music here — too much, perhaps, considering the violence and raucousness of the tale unfolding — seemed baleful and droopy. But the male vocal ensemble was fine, and moody songs like the Francisco Salinas’ “Media noche era por filo” were gorgeously gauged. The instrumentalists were top-drawer, with Arianna Savall sometimes singing while accompanying herself on harp.

After all that, the ending was pretty jarring. Cervantes’ Quixote spends his last years in a great melancholy, and dies cured of his sanity but broken in spirit. Savall’s two-disc CD of Quixote includes more music than we were served, and it ends appropriately with the knight’s sadness and death. On Friday we got a zippy Chaconne as a finale instead, an oddly upbeat ending for a program striving to convey the spirit of Cervantes’ classic.
To reach Paul Horsley, performing arts editor, send email to phorsley@sbcglobal.net.

Friday, October 24, 2008

Two Weeks out -The Race Tightens --Why?

The $4 a gallon gas made us crazy. Hmmm and it’s $2.33 today. Then Wall Street blew up and real people lost hard earned money. ” Yet the government still needed over $800 billion of our money. Examples of corporate greed, waste and fraud seem unending. Finger pointing is rampant. No one is accepting responsibility. No apologies are being issued. The devil is clothed in cash. The taxpayers said “enough”. What does our future hold?

So which candidate is best equipped to handle these prickly issues? Avoid mainstream TV, paid advertising, printed Op-Ed pages and talk radio. It’s nothing but opinion, hyperbole and BS. Think for yourself. Do your own research. Search for the truth. Reflect. Don’t just react. Think. Check and re-check the facts. Focus on http://www.realclearpolitics.com/. It’s an amalgam of all polling data. It will give you the average of all the polls.

Hunker down. It’s going to be a wild ride. We need the truth. Search for the truth. Pray for the truth.


October 21, 2008

Annie Presley
Political Blogster
The McKellar Group

The opinions of all Independent Insider blogsters do not necessarily reflect the views of the publishers, staff and advertisers of The Independent or the Independent Insider. They are solely the views of the individual contributors.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

KC Chorale offers tough expressionist rarity on season-opening concert

By Paul Horsley

Sunday’s weather seemed way too beautiful for indulging in 1930s European angst, but I wouldn’t have missed the Kansas City Chorale’s performance of a rare work by Ernst Krenek for all the Chiefs drubbings in the world. Come to think of it, a brisk fall day is the perfect time to think about life’s brevity: Outside Redemptorist Catholic Church, brown leaves were being blown about by a vaguely-too-chilled wind that seemed to forebode winter. But not even all of that could have prepared us for the grisly impact of Krenek’s marvelously titled Kantate von der Vergänglichkeit des Irdsichen, whose English translation sounds just as extravagant: Cantata on the Transitoriness of Earthly Things.

It was composed in Vienna in 1932, shortly before the Nazis seized power, and thus its images of war, terror, greed and pestilence seem apt. Ironically, its texts are drawn from 17th-century poets writing about Europe’s horrendous Thirty Years’ War — which as if to bring the impact full-circle can be read today as if they’ve been ripped from the news. (“Thundering guns have devoured all that sweat and toil and diligence have made. … Fresh-spilled blood runs unceasingly through fort and town.”) Under Charles Bruffy’s courageous direction, the Chorale sang it like there was no tomorrow, in its season-opening concert. We can only hope that their record company, Chandos, gets wind of this performance and puts it on disc.

Krenek’s musical language is ferocious, dense, with a chilly elegance: It stitches together Schoenbergian dissonance, Mahlerian post-Romanticism and almost Bach-like “chorales.” A lavishly daring soprano tries to inject sanity (Rebecca Lloyd at her operatic best, with Robert Pherigo on piano), yet the chorus continues to wheedle and sob, growing strident then mournful. The final moment of near-hope is a radiant, sustained apotheosis, like the resigned end to a bloody victory.

The program had begun with Mendelssohn’s Lieder im Freien zu singen (Songs to Sing in the Open Air), a set of six a cappella songs on outdoorsy topics. Sunny and vigorous, they were the perfect foil to Krenek’s tortured cantata — so radically different, in fact, that the juxtaposition seemed almost diabolical. Bruffy and the Chorale delivered them with hearty good taste, and their spare textures were not overwhelmed by Redemptorist’s active acoustics.

Brahms’ Liebeslieder Waltzes were not so fortunate. This quaint set of “love-songs-set-as-waltzes” could not have felt more out of place than in this enormous, over-decorated wedding cake of a church. Though the smaller, tender moments were poignant, the more vigorous numbers were blurred almost beyond recognition by the church's reverberation. Sometimes a venue unwittingly becomes a part of an artistic experience, positively or negatively. These waltzes are more suited to someone’s living room.

We were fast approaching the two-hour mark when the Chorale began the last piece, The Passing of the Year, by contemporary British composer Jonathan Dove. It seemed prolix, especially coming at the end of such a stuffed-full afternoon. It juxtaposes churning minimalist rhythms — nicely scored for piano yet sounding a tad too derivative (and how about that Stravinsky rip-off in "Ah, Sun-flower"?) — with atmospheric soundscapes that showed sensitivity to the poetry by William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Tennyson and others. Dove creates ingenious devices and he executes them with workmanlike skill, like the interlarding of the line “Lord, have mercy on us” within Thomas Nashe's "Adieu! farewell, earth's bliss!” But he consistently overworks his material, repeating lines of text for no apparent rhetorical or musical reason. Pity poor Emily Dickinson’s tiny “Answer July,” whose pithy wit was obliterated by belabored repetitions that very nearly drove me up Redemptorist’s lavishly outfitted walls.

The concert, which the Chorale calls “One Piano, Four Hands, 24 Voices,” is repeated at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, October 21 at Church of the Nativity, 3800 W. 119th St., Leawood. For tickets call 816-235-6222 or go to http://www.kcchorale.org/.

To reach Paul Horsley, performing arts editor, send email to phorsley@sbcglobal.net.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Welcome

Welcome!
We are excited to preview The Independent Insider, a fun new step in the development of Kansas City's Weekly Journal of Society.We are pleased to offer you an interactive, up-to-date expression of Our Town, its people, its events and its arts. But this is just a taste of what's yet to come!In the coming weeks we will unveil an entirely new website, rich with the content and information you have come to expect from The Independent. But it isn't our printed version just placed online. No, this will have content you've never seen before on our pages, chock full of interesting tidbits, photos and of course those famous "I Wonders". We will have expanded coverage of all the Performing Arts in Kansas City, including reviews by our resident critic, Paul Horsley. Neighborhood pages to keep you up to date on what is happening in your neck of the woods, and two amazing calendars. One specifically for The Performing Arts, and the other for all the fun parties we cover. We are so excited by the planning and thought that have gone into this new endeavor, and can hardly wait to bring it to you! We are sure you will be pleased when it goes live later this Fall.Meanwhile, enjoy this small taste of what the future holds.

Friday, October 17, 2008

Eight-voice Octarium choir continues upward trajectory

By Paul Horsley

Octarium, the eight-voice a cappella choir founded locally in 2001, gets better every time I hear it. The ensemble’s concert Friday at Visitation Church showed off the meticulous blend and fresh, youthful sonority that the group has become known for. They sang the repertoire from their new self-produced recording, Essentials, which is available at http://www.octarium.org/. Octarium, whose name means “eight as one,” was founded under the direction of Krista Lang Blackwood, a choral conductor and former Kansas City Chorale singer, who prepares the ensemble but allows it to sing sans directeur in concert.

While larger groups that perform at Visitation sometimes sound muddy, on Friday the church’s almost-too-lush acoustic was flattering to Octarium’s fragile balances and exposed textures. Maurice Durufle’s Ubi Caritas sounded ravishingly beautiful, and except for the faint whisper of the church’s air units it was extraordinary how audible and warm the super-pianissimos sounded — not blanched-out, but with real fiber and substance. Equally impressive was the male fortissimos of the Rachmaninoff Vespers excerpt, which was muscular without sounding forced. William Byrd’s “Sanctus-Benedictus” from the Mass for Four Voices was captivating for the continuity of the successive entrances — so impressive, in fact, that I found myself wishing they’d just go ahead and sing the whole mass. (In fact overall the concert felt a bit too excerpt-y.) They also excelled in light-hearted works like Josquin dez Prez’s El Grillo and Orazio Vecchi’s Fa Una Canzona, which were suave and convincing while avoiding cutesiness. Antonio Lotti’s “Sanctus” from the Simple Mass was clean and direct. Stanford’s The Blue Bird featured a delicious solo by soprano Ashley Elizabeth Winters, with a voice as sparkling-clear as a chilly mountain stream.

Traces of Octarium’s earlier bad habits were still apparent, like the tendency to allow hyper-expressiveness turn into preciousness and sluggishness. Randall Thompson’s Alleluia, a pretty straightforward piece all in all, grew so willowy that I lost a sense that it was going anywhere. Bruckner’s Os Justi seemed to yearn for a fatter choral sound, and its surprisingly tricky attacks caused mild messiness. Palestrina’s Sicut Cervus felt weighted-down. And the “Shenandoah” arrangement sung as an encore was in dire need of some pep. (It’s a melancholy song, but for heaven’s sake it ain’t high tragedy.) Most disappointing for me was Monteverdi’s flashy madrigal Ecco mormorar l’onde, which needed more fire in the belly — more flamboyance, for instance, in the delivery of its jolting, jubilant chord shifts.

But this was a fine concert anyway, capped by one of the most beautifully gauged renderings of Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei you’re likely to hear. It’s an a cappella choral arrangement, by Barber himself, of the famous Adagio for Strings, and once you’ve heard it sung like this you might never go back to the over-performed string version.

The choir repeats the concert at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, October 18, at Corpus Christi Church, 6001 Bob Billings in Lawrence.

To reach Paul Horsley, performing arts editor, send email to phorsley@sbcglobal.net.

Friday, October 10, 2008

'Rodeo' forms centerpiece of KC Ballet's rewarding season opener

By Paul Horsley

If you still doubt that ballet is drama, as opposed to pretty poses in the service of abstract concepts, look no further than the Kansas City Ballet’s performances that began Thursday, October 9 at the Lyric Theatre. The program featured three capital works by American choreographers bent on showing that ballet can tell narratives while maintaining an abstract core. Thursday’s premiere was an auspicious kick-start for the company’s 2008-2009 season, even if opening-night gaffes were apparent — an errant spotlight here, dropped insect antennae there, fuzzy ensemble-work in the corps and a scary moment or two in the orchestra pit.

The big draw, perhaps, was Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo, a staple of the company’s repertoire. Take one of Aaron Copland’s best scores and put it with dance by one of the most influential figures of the 20th century and you have an irresistible American classic. The restaging by legendary dancer Paul Sutherland, who worked with De Mille and other choreographic giants, was lovingly meticulous. Deeanna Doyle burst with poised energy as the Cowgirl, who sheds her awkward ranch-hand ways to become the belle of the hoe-down. She delved a flighty comedic vein at the outset, where she couldn’t seem to control her “horse,” and gradually she expanded her bag of tricks to woo the graceful Champion Roper.

Kansas City Ballet newcomer Michael Eaton was her match as the Roper, confident but not swashbuckling, brimming with leonine energy. His famous tap dance scene in the Ranch House scene — the first use of tap in a ballet, historians tell us — was delightfully top-of-the-line. He is an impressive new addition to the company, one of five new members this season, four of whom are men.

The winsome little moments between Doyle and Roper showed a natural ease and chemistry, as did those between real-life married couple Juan Pablo Trujillo (Head Wrangler) and Stefani Schrimpf (the über-feminine Ranch Owner’s Daughter). Oliver Smith’s scenic design is looking dated, as are the costumes (though the Ballet’s men looked pretty hot in their tight-fitting cowpoke digs) but the company dancers were in good form throughout, bringing off the opening scene’s little country plies with understated care.

The other hit was The Naughty Boy, the Kansas City Ballet’s first performance of a work by the young, much-talked-about American choreographer Trey McIntyre. Set to Mozart’s G-major Violin Concerto, which was played live in the pit, it is a breathless tale of Cupid and his methods, told in a jam-packed style that is like ballet in fast motion. Something’s happening every second: It almost wears out the eyes. Perhaps because the work of Jerome Robbins had opened the evening, I couldn’t help seeing similarities in the way McIntyre elevates vernacular movement to balletic refinement, so that distinctions almost, but not quite, blur. Sexy and delicious to watch, it has a sort of continually merry undercurrent.

Kimberly Cowen was a madcap Cupid, playful but generous in her ministrations to the four love-couples. She gave the role an innocence, even when it appeared she was suggesting amorous positions to the lovers. Costume designers Kirsty Munn and Liza Prince dressed her in a pumpkin-and-brown plaid cheerleader’s outfit, complete with pumpkin-colored coon’s-skin cap. (I know: Huh?) Lead couple Breanne Starke and Luke Luzicka worked like devils in the spectacular pas-de-deux-with-interference, in which Cowen sometimes intervenes to show them, perhaps, the true nature of love and romance.

Starting the evening with Robbins’ The Concert, also a Ballet reprise, was a nice touch: It’s a piece that ostensibly pokes fun of classical music but is in fact a powerful parody of ballet itself. Angelina Sansone stood out in her roles as groupie and hat lady, and Logan Pachciarz as a hip-swiveling loco was choice. The women’s sextet, a classical romp with one girl who’s never quite right, delivered its nutty humor. But on the whole, The Concert didn’t strike me as being as deeply funny this time around. It wasn’t, perhaps, the fault of the dancers: Some of Robbins’ humor just doesn’t wear well, at least not to me. And visually I was offended by the ugly sight of a wheel-stand beneath the piano, which together with the Lyric’s unsightly, scuffed stage eroded the sense of faux-refinement necessary to set up Robbins’ fragile humor.

The Ballet’s fall performances continue through Sunday, October 12. For tickets call 816-931-2232 or go to kcballet.org.

To reach Paul Horsley, send email to phorsley@sbcglobal.net.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Still Undecided? Probably Not.

Are you bored with this presidential campaign? And still undecided??

Fed up? Sick of these folks? Worn out with it?

If you can’t stand to hear another peep from the candidates, the talking heads, the loud mouths…..but you think you’re still undecided… don’t worry, you’re not. You have decided, but you just don’t know it. When you go into the voting booth, your hand will go to the button that your mind has determined is the right choice for you.

So quit worrying. Right now. Be happy. Tune it out. Think positive thoughts. No need to grind your teeth anymore. Your subconscious mind has made a decision and it just hasn’t told your brain yet. Seriously.

Pay no further attention to the blatherers on TV, the radio, the internet and the newspaper. They are talking to the folks who are dithering with the decision. If you find all of this horribly annoying, then you’ve made up your mind and you just don’t know it.

REJOICE. It’s almost over! Go vote. Your subconscious will guide your hand.

10-8-08

Annie Presley
Political Blogster
The McKellar Group



The opinions of all Independent Insider blogsters do not necessarily reflect the views of the publishers, staff and advertisers of The Independent or the Independent Insider. They are solely the views of the individual contributors.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Perlman performs on Harriman-Jewell Series to sold-out Folly Theater

By Paul Horsley

When violinist Itzhak Perlman plays a sad, noble tune like the Gavotta theme from Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne, the lyricism and warmth grabs you by the lapels. There’s something of heart-open, Old World violin tradition there — a nostalgia, perhaps, for what music was like before Sumi Jo and Yanni.

Saturday’s sold-out Harriman-Jewell Series recital had too few such moments for my taste. Perlman is a central virtuoso of the last 50 years and a wonderful humanitarian, but this was not one of his better nights. Moreover, it’s virtually the same recital he’s offered up the last half-dozen times I’ve heard him.

The menu rarely varies: Baroque sonata, Beethoven maybe, Brahms or Frank or something mildly edgy but not too, and finally a long series of bon-bons. Sprinkled, of course, with the exact same jokes and the age-old shtick where the violinist searches aimlessly for the score to the next piece.

There were rewarding moments. Perlman and his pianist, Rohan De Silva, were best in the Stravinsky suite, arranged from the composer’s Pulcinella. Its idiom suited both players just fine, and the sense of interplay was that of two old friends who know intimately each other’s strengths and foibles. In the slow passages, Perlman displayed his delicious long line, though in fortissimos the tone could turn chalky and brittle.

The program began with a LeClair Sonata in D major, sweet and familiar. Beethoven’s Sonata in C minor (Op. 30, No. 2) was next, where De Silva made clear that this was a piece for violin and piano. I’ve long admired his musicianship, but here he seemed rattled and in a hurry. The duo missed much of the inner turmoil here. In the Scherzo, for example, they chose virtual parody over elegant, muscular self-assertion.

The encores — old favorites all — included Kreisler’s beautiful Andantino in the Style of Martini, two delicious Tchaikovsky pieces (Humoresque and Chanson sans paroles) and Bazzini’s mindless Dance of the Goblins. Again the Perlman gifts were heard to best advantage in the lyrical works.

Saturday, October 4, 2008

Friends of Chamber Music series turns iconoclastic with Brentano String Quartet season opener

By Paul Horsley

Is all great art, on some level, subversive? The Friends of Chamber Music season-opening concert by the Brentano String Quartet on Friday (October 3) made a pretty good case for the notion that upheaval, trauma and icon-toppling have always provided the raw material for art of all kinds. To underscore the point, scattered throughout the Folly Theater was an exhibition, Art of Unrest, of artworks dealing with war, protest, poverty, injustice, mental illness and bigotry.

The centerpiece of the concert was the first local performance of Chicago-based composer Lee Hyla’s Howl, an in-your-face composition from 1994 that features Allen Ginsberg on tape reading his famous epic poem to a harrowing string accompaniment. Hyla’s dense, complex string textures seemed intent on matching the strident ferocity of Ginsberg’s rant, and I must admit the music was at times relentlessly confrontational to both the ear and the mind.

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” begins the poem, and goes on to paint one of the wittiest, angriest critiques of modern society. It’s more than half a century old, but you’d never know it. (“Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!”) Hyla has created an effective sonic backdrop that at times underscores Ginsberg’s voice, at times willfully contrasts.

The problem with this performance was that I could understand less than 25 percent of Ginsberg’s recitation, because the speaker volume had been set so that when the quartet played anything above a forte it almost completely obscured his voice. The composer no doubt intended the voice to be drowned part of the time, but on the Nonesuch recording of the piece (which uses a different, more distinct recording of Ginsberg) you can understand far more than I did on Friday. It weakened the piece’s impact to miss so much of this wonderful poem. (There was an “unofficial” printed text available in the foyer, but as the house was dark it was of no use.)

What was fascinating about this concert, however, was that the two pieces of “nice” music that framed the Hyla, by Haydn and Schumann, were actually just as unsettled and subversive. Friends’ founder Cynthia Siebert alluded to this in her comments from the stage, reminding us that great art sets out to “define something that has not been defined by anyone before.” And sure enough, when the Brentanos sat down to begin Haydn’s G-minor Quartet (Op. 20, No. 3), those crazily irregular opening phrases knocked your ears right off of dead-center. Gone were 18th-century images of powdered periwigs and princely entertainment: Suddenly you were reminded that Haydn was as much the revolutionary as Ginsberg or anyone else.

In the 16 years since they started, the Brentanos — violinists Mark Steinberg and Serena Canin, violist Misha Amory and cellist Nina Lee — have grown from youthful brilliance to maturity, continuing to deepen and polish their musical understanding to the n’th degree. On Friday they produced some of the most beautifully balanced, well-reasoned playing I’ve heard from them. Haydn’s slow movement was tender and exquisite, reaching a breathtaking height of expressiveness. Likewise Schumann’s unsettled ramblings, in the A-major Quartet (Op. 41, No. 3), were treated to a luxurious rendering that brought me to a new level of appreciation of the piece.

Of course when an achievement operates on such a level, it’s the little things that annoy, like Steinberg’s habit of swallowing the ends of phrases instead of playing them honestly to the last note, or the hairy off-beat accompanying chords in the first movement, which I felt needed sharper focus. Sometimes the Brentanos’ pursuit of subtlety and detail leads to something bordering on preciousness.

But this is a wonderful ensemble, and on Friday they were firing with “all four pistons,” so to speak. The shattering climax of Schumann's second movement, which builds from nothingness to unbelievable intensity, was a concert moment I will not soon forget.


To reach Paul Horsley, send email to phorsley@sbcglobal.net.