Review: Hall Ensemble gives enjoyable, informal concert at coffee house
Someone undoubtedly had history in mind when planning Sunday evening’s opening of the Hall Ensemble’s fourth season.
The program was at the Avoca Coffee House. The atmosphere was informal. Masterpieces of music were well-played, including a couple of pieces so little known to the musical public that they might as well have been brand-new.
This pattern goes back a long way — at least to the 1730s and Zimmermann’s Coffee House in Leipzig, Germany. Zimmermann’s was a popular venue with musicians, and on Friday nights the Collegium Musicum, an organization of university musicians, and their director, Johann Sebastian Bach, were the featured group.
By all accounts the atmosphere was highly informal. During breaks, the musicians mingled with their audience rather than retreating to a secluded place in the back somewhere.
Had you been alive in Leipzig in the 1730s, for the price of a cup of coffee you would have had a chance to chat with Bach. You might have heard the world premiere of his Coffee Cantata, a product of those days.
Alas, Gottfried Zimmermann, the proprietor, died in 1741 and the sessions ended. The building that housed his coffeehouse stood for two more centuries, until it was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1943.
Bach lives on, of course, and a movement of his Concerto for Two Violins in D minor was the opener for Sunday night’s concert. In a striking move, the Hall Ensemble invited two gifted amateur musicians, Joe Cleveland and Hallie Yarbrough (Cleveland’s sister), to play the two featured violin parts. This they did respectably, and with the backing of ensemble regulars, produced a spirit-lifting performance.
The other musicians were violinists Jennifer Chang and Izumi Lund, violist Alexandra Holowka, cellist Karen Hall and bassoonist Kevin Hall (an unorthodox but effective grouping in this arrangement).
The one contemporary work of the evening was Bassango by Canadian bassoonist and composer Mathieu Lussier. “Bassango” is a contraction of “bassoon” and “tango,” and a tango it definitely is.
The focus was on bassoonist Hall, of course. He and his partners gave a joyful performance that, in his case, made one wonder: Does bassoonists’ breath-challenging exercise give them special protection against lung diseases?
Another joyful exercise was the Quartet for Bassoon, Violin, Viola and Cello, Opus 4, by Beethoven’s contemporary and bassoon virtuoso Carl Heinrich Jacobi (“If you don’t know Jacobi, you don’t play the bassoon,” Kevin Hall quipped.)
This proved to be an amiable, elegant work with a touch of melancholy in the slow movement. It also provides exercise for bassoonists.
In a sharp change of mood, violinists Chang and Lund, violist Holowka and cellist Karen Hall played Beethoven’s final string quartet, Opus 135 in F major. This beautiful work contains, in its second movement, one of the most astonishing, pulse-racing episodes in all of music. The four players gave a thrilling, and moving, performance of the whole.
The Hall Ensemble played one happy encore: Por Una Cabeza, another catchy tango.