‘Mimir Chamber Music Festival’ @ Kimbell Art Museum (opening performance)
Photos courtesy of Mimir Chamber Music Festival
—Wayne Lee Gay
For nearly three decades, the Mimir Chamber Music Festival (named for the Norse god of wisdom) has relieved the region's annual midsummer classical music drought with a superb series of concerts. Founded by violinist Curt Thompson during his time on the faculty at Texas Christian University, Mimir's concert series exists in conjunction with a program that attracts aspiring young artists—most of whom already have a foothold in the professional world—for training and interaction with a faculty of experienced established performers.
Now on the faculty of the of the Melbourne Conservatorium in Australia, Thompson also directs an annual southern hemisphere version of Mimir. This year's festival concert series opened Wednesday night at Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum with an all-romantic but intriguingly varied program.
Nineteenth-century Belgian-French composer César Franck holds an odd place in music history, having produced a substantial body of largely forgotten and ignored works along with a small handful of masterpieces—the most sublime of which is his Sonata in A for Piano and Violin. New York-based Italian-American pianist Alessio Bax joined violinist Jun Iwasaki (concertmaster of the Kansas City Symphony) in presenting a performance that flowed smoothly from the delicately etched opening measures through (typical for Franck) constant shifts of darkness and light.
The weather added a touch of visual drama on cue in the first crescendo, in fact, when a cloud passed by and sunlight beamed through the high glass wall behind the stage. Throughout, Bax and Iwasaki navigated the mood shifts with technical precision and emotional command, flowing toward and through the wonderful canon that crowns the final movement.
That precision of ensemble technique and emotion was equally present in the next work on the program, the rarely performed Quintet for Piano and Strings by twentieth-century Italian Ottorino Respighi. Rich in lyrical expression and striking textures, the Quintet reveals a composer capable of subtleties beyond the brassy fanfares and birdcalls of his more famous orchestral tone poems. For this Quintet, pianist Bax returned to the stage with violinists Thompson and Iwasaki, cellist Brant Taylor (of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Pink Martini ensemble), and Houston Symphony principal violist Joan DerHovsepian.
Respighi here tests the ensemble's expertise with some tricky exposed unison textures, all of which landed perfectly; violist DerHovsepian and cellist Taylor in particular produced a gorgeously rich timbre in the several passages the composer wrote for viola and cello in unison.
After intermission, Steven Rose, principal second violinist of the Cleveland Orchestra, joined Iwasaki, Taylor, and DerHovsepian for Mendelssohn's String Quartet in A minor. The shadows of Beethoven and Bach loom large here, but Mendelssohn's own melodic inspiration and contrapuntal skill are clearly evident as well. The quartet gave a sturdy and passionate performance in which the final movement felt almost like an operatic scene with a final, serene denouement.
WHEN: The Mimir Chamber Music Festival continues with concerts on July 3, 5, 8, and 10; "Emerging Artists" concerts will be presented on July 2 and 9.
WHERE: Renzo Piano Pavilion/Kimbell Art Museum, 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth
WEB: mimirfestival.org
