Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 25, 1993 TAG: 9310250009
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A nearly full Olin Hall at Roanoke College heard the college's trio-in-residence with two guests, Nonesuch recording artist and violinist Charles Castleman and violist Lenny Schranze. The audience included high school and college students from South Carolina and Baltimore attending a chamber music weekend at the college.
This was among the most satisfying concerts ever sponsored by the award-winning trio, which is fast gaining a national reputation and may have a recording contract in its future. An enthusiastic audience responded with bravos; in the final standing ovation, the listeners demanded an encore.
The unaccompanied Kandinskies began the evening with a piece seldom heard in Western Virginia, the Trio in E Minor, Hob. XV:12, of Franz Josef Haydn. In fact, violinist Benedict Goodfriend told an interviewer last week that he himself was unfamiliar with the work until this season and was pleasantly surprised by its substance.
It was a strong performance in which Elizabeth Bachelder shone in the prominent piano part. Especially fine was the fleet final movement, a rondo marked presto which featured light-footed performances from all three players.
Guest violinist Charles Castleman, whom Benedict Goodfriend introduced as an idol of his student days, was simply wonderful in the rarely heard Sonata for Violin and Piano of Francis Poulenc.
What a fiddler! Big, spacious tone, flawless technique and a masterful musical intelligence were the ingredients in this performance of a work which, according to Kandinsky cellist Alan Weinstein, was based on the life of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca.
The piece is vintage Poulenc, with a jazzy and melancholy first movement, a romantic middle movement and a virtuoso final movement that brought down the house. Perhaps in recognition of Lorca's Spanish homeland, the piece was filled with pizzicati, pluckings and strummings which evoke the sound of a guitar, particularly in the middle movement.
To put it plainly, this sonata had some of the finest violin playing I have heard in live performance in Western Virginia. Castleman is a fiddler the likes of which is rarely heard in these parts, and the Olin Hall audience evidently concurred, responding with loud applause and shouts of bravo.
After a longish intermission, violist Lenny Schranze joined Castleman and the Kandinskies for the greatest of the chamber music works of Robert Schumann, the Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 44.
The evening seemed to lead up to this piece, which got a well-thought-out performance from the vehement opening tutti to the masterful fugue in three voices that concluded the work. Pianist Elizabeth Bachelder continued a hard-working evening with this piece, which seemed to require more of her than of any other instrumentalist.
The beautiful second movement, reminiscent of a funeral march, featured bravura playing from first violinist Castleman in the busy contrasting middle section. The third-movement scherzo is the apotheosis of the scale, in which Schumann demonstrated just how much mileage a master could get from a simple motif.
The great final movement had a symphonic richness in Saturday night's performance. Especially brilliant was the amazing coda, which contains not one but two fugues, and which concluded with an immediate standing ovation.
Although the five musicians had practiced together for only a day, they were faced with an audience that simply demanded an encore. The quintet responded with a spirited reprise of the scherzo to end this promising season opener for the Kandinskies.
Seth Williamson produces feature news stories and a weekday classical music program on public radio station WVTF (89.1 FM) in Roanoke.
by CNB