Review: The Chamber Music Society of St. Louis meets the Italian muse

Italy has bestowed countless gifts upon the world, but among the greatest is the gift of music--and specifically, the gift of melody. From the earliest days of Gregorian chant to Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Rossini, Verdi, Puccini and into the present day, Italian composers have demonstrated a profound ability to craft melodies of haunting originality and depth. Bach himself drew enormous inspiration from studying the works of Vivaldi, Alessandro Marcello, Pergolesi and others. 

The Chamber Music Society of Saint Louis highlighted the contributions of Italian music at their concert on October 14 at Washington University's 560 Building in University City, allowing a rich scope of melody and voicing to shine in cameo-like relief through the intimacy of a chamber music setting. Guests were seated around circular tables in the recital hall, allowing for a relaxed setting in which to meet new friends and discuss the selections, enhanced with snacks from Volpi Foods and assorted beverages.

Artistic Director Marc Gordon assembled, as always, a talented group of performers, each capable of performing solo or as part of a chamber setting: Jessie Chen and Kyle Lombard, violin; Andrew Francois and Susan Gordon, viola; Alvin McCall and Yin Xiong, cello; Jennifer Nitchman, flute; Philip Ross, oboe; Megan Stout, harp; and Benedetta Orsi, mezzo soprano. It goes without saying that rehearsal time is surely limited for busy musicians with multiple responsibilities, yet all performed with excellent balance and well-synced coordination. 

Italian composers have always possessed a keen sense of the visual aspect of music--Vivaldi's Four Seasons invites us to imagine a storm, a barking dog and all the colors of the changing months, for example--so it is only natural that Italy has made enormous contributions to film scoring, sometimes to the point where certain movies are more famous for the music they showcase than the storyline or acting: "Gabriel's Oboe" is perhaps better known than the movie in which it appeared, "The Mission." Today the piece is often heard on various solo instruments, but oboist Philip Ross presented the piece as originally conceived, with the oboe soaring above an instrumental background. Ross made his instrument sing with a warm and liquid voice; the only possible regret--and this is a compliment--might be that the audience could have gratefully heard a little more of him if he had been positioned front and center of the accompanying strings.

Like Morricone, Nino Rota has also garnered great acclaim for his film scores, but the audience learned that Rota composed a vast amount of "stand alone" music on his own.  His Quintet for Flute, Oboe, Viola, Violoncello and Harp is a beautiful and colorful work, filled with lyrical melodies, yet perhaps a touch of 20th century boldness. The rich variety of instrumentation belied the fact that this was a work intended for only five performers.

Giacomo Puccini and Gioacchino Rossini are known principally for their operatic works, yet both were featured in instrumental works on the program. Puccini's "Three Minuets" for string quartet provided a reflective glimpse of the lyricism and drama that made him famous. For his part, Rossini chose to give a bel canto role not to a soprano, but to a solo flute in his Flute Quartet No. 3 in B-flat Major. Flutist Jennifer Nitchman executed the gliding solo passages with the same elegance and control that we would expect from a highly trained operatic singer.

But a soprano was not lacking on the program. Benedetta Orsi gave voice to Ottorino Respighi's setting of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "Il tramonto" (The Sunset). Perhaps no other composer is able to evoke such powerful images as Respighi (think "The Pines of Rome"). In this work, he chose to limit his palette to a string quartet and solo voice, yet the work remains powerful in its expression of the grief of a young woman who has just lost her lover. In a strange way, a chamber work like this is almost reminiscent of Arnold Schoenberg's "Transfigured Night," which was originally conceived as a chamber work, also portraying the struggles of two lovers grappling with unexpected challenges.

Finally, it would be almost obligatory for a concert such as this to include a work by Antonio Vivaldi...and perhaps also one by Antonio Salieri, who in his day was very much a formidable rival to Mozart--and not necessarily considered his inferior. Vivaldi's "Concerto alla rustica," performed by string quartet, is a quick reminder of the composer's broader mission as music director, teacher and composer for a girls' orphanage in Venice, where he produced a seemingly endless stream of concertos for his young students to perform as they presented themselves to Venetian society. Similarly, Salieri's "La fuga" (The Fugue), also for string quartet, demonstrated the composer's command of his craft, even in shorter works.

The St. Louis-Bologna Sister Cities organization partnered with the Chamber Music Society of St. Louis to present this program. Notably, soprano Benedetta Orsi, who resides in St. Louis with her husband, conductor Darwin Aquino, and their son, is a native of Bologna, thus adding a unifying link on this program for the two cities.

Important take-aways from this program would include the kaleidoscopic view of the amazing creativity and melodic spontaneity of Italian composers. Each work on the program was like a painting in a gallery, yet each with its own style, colors and images. Dozens more concerts could be produced based on the same theme as this one--one can imagine attending a program of Italian art songs, arias and/or folk songs; or perhaps a program that features Scarlatti sonatas or Baroque keyboard works from Italy; or maybe some of the brass works written by members of the Gabrieli family. The works of Vivaldi alone could present a spectrum of nearly every instrument in the orchestra--the possibilities are endless.