The Des Moines Register
By BRUCE CARR
You can always count on the presenters of On Stage at the Art Center to come up with something intriguing, sensuous and satisfying. Saturday night's concert was no exception.
The full-house audience in Levitt Auditorium at the Des Moines Art Center was treated to thrilling performances of four seldom-heard chamber works by the five members of the Aspen Ensemble.
Named from the famed Aspen Music Festival in Colorado where they first came together, the quintet is one of the most innovative chamber groups around. In a few short seasons, they've already established a solid reputation.
First on the program was a mysterious, charming Beethoven piece, the Serenade, Op. 25, for flute, violin and viola.
Mysterious because little is known of when it was written, or why, or for whom.
Charming because, for all of Beethoven's provincial upbringing, his native skill and his eagerness to delight emerged astonishingly early in his career.
Satisfying because of the absolute unanimity of the performers - flutist Nadine Asin, violinist David Perry and violist Victoria Chiang - who played standing (rather than sitting) as most instrumentalists still did at the end of the 1700s.
The three musicians highlighted everything remarkable about this slightly anonymous set of marches, dances and variations (only in the next-to-last movement Scherzo did this reviewer hear seeds of the later, grittier Beethoven). The little melancholy introduction to the final perpetual-motion rondo was particularly affecting.
The concert next moved into the mid-20th century, with an equally charming but much more substantial trio by Bohuslav Martinu, a Czech whose international fame was largely gained in the United States, especially Boston.
This work, in which the silvery-toned Asin was joined by cellist Michael Mermagen and pianist Rita Sloan, was written in 1944. Its motoric first movement was succeeded by a gorgeous slow movement with heart-stoppingly beautiful long lines that comprised the emotional center of the piece; after that came a perky finale.
Here again the group performed as one, and Sloan traversed what seemed like a fiendishly difficult piano part with perfect clarity and understated grace.
Perry, Chiang and Mermagen returned after intermission for the first movement of an otherwise incomplete string trio by Franz Schubert dating from about 20 years after the Beethoven serenade that opened the concert. Like that work, it was written very early in its creator's career (Schubert was 19). This Allegro in B-flat was similarly attractive and unexceptional - until it broke wide open at the beginning of the development section and blossomed into wonderfully characteristic Schubertian harmonic adventures that tugged the heartstrings all over again.
Great thanks go to the Aspen musicians for letting us hear this rarity.
Finally, the three string players were rejoined by pianist Sloan for Antonin Dvorak's Piano Quartet in E-flat from 1889, four years before the famous summer that the Bohemian composer spent in Spillville, Ia.
Often overlooked in favor of Dvorak's earlier and larger Piano Quintet, this piece turned out to be a stunner.
The first movement's shifting moods were expressed with equal fervor by all, interweaving especially the strength and beauty of Chiang's viola with the suavity of Perry's violin. The work's second movement was the weightiest and most moving of the whole evening, both in cellist Mermagen's subtle and sensitive solo, which starts it off and in the passionate outbursts that continue it.
The Austrian peasant-dance that Dvorak was trying for in the third movement sounded, at times to these ears, like a honky-tonk waltz, but why not? The performers' committed ensemble and obvious pleasure carried the quartet through to conclusion with gusto, garnering enthusiastic applause.
There was no encore, and - on top of such a fine concert so finely delivered - none was needed.