Chamber Music Society dances with Brahms, Bartok, Ravel

The Chamber Music Society of St. Louis has an inspired way of opening their concerts with a student performance. For the program on Monday, April 20 at the 560 Music Center, a student group performed the second movement from Bela Bartok’s String Quartet No. 2. The student performances at these concerts are always more than a novelty, but this quartet of high schoolers performing Bartok’s idiosyncratic, edgy, unpredictable mountain music was more like a prodigy.

It was a fitting way to begin a night of classical chamber music inspired by Romani (misnamed “Gypsy” in the program) traditions and Hungarian folk song and dance.

Four striving high school students (Hayden Baker, Zoe Baldwin, Reid Huntley and Sylvia Kennedy) yielded the stage to two consummate professionals: Shen Wen sat at the piano and Xiaoxiao Qiang stood forth in a luminous white gown to fiddle through Pablo de Sarasate‘s Zigeunerweisen. Titled after the misnamed “Gypsy Airs” the composer adapted, these were mostly cries of the heart played at a knife’s edge. Then, they played brisk, bright dances, intensely physical to perform. They closed with a thrilling, breakneck piano-violin duet run.

For Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane, we were treated to our fourth violinist (Angie Smart) and second pianist (Alla Voskoboynikova) of the concert. In their expressive telling,Tzigane sounded like Ravel’s sketchbook, a gifted artist blasting out idea after idea. Just the violin opened for an extremely long solo pass ending in string finger-plunking pyrotechnics. After a long listen and wait, the pianist burst in with busy, lush two-handed runs up and down the keyboard.

The piano captured my attention away from the violin with a droning, repetitive, looped-before-looping pattern I associate with Philip Glass (born near the beginning of 1937) not Maurice Revel (dead near the end of 1937). Tzigane sounded like new music now. Marc Gordon, director of Chamber Music Society of St. Louis, is quite the scout for sleeper masterpieces by major composers and all this layered local talent to evoke it.

The first half of the program closed perfectly with Johannes Brahms’ Hungarian Dances for Piano 4 Hands, or at least seven of those 21 miniatures. This performance threatened to overwhelm me – what with Brahms’ inventiveness, the dazzling appeal of the folkloric material, and the uniquely thrilling character of piano four hands placed in four talented hands (those of Wen and Voskoboynikova) playing daring music, not the usual parlor tricks.

If Tzigane was Ravel’s sketchbook, Hungarian Dances was Brahms’ reel of short films, and early filmmakers feasted on these songs. The selection included dance No. 5 in F sharp Minor, which Charles Chaplin immortalized in The Great Dictator (made in 1940 but relevant again in 2026). Brahms told so many stories, conjured so many episodes from so many lives, in these dance songs. The piano playing was so grand, expansive, warm and observant.

The program – always generous with Chamber Music Society of St. Louis – somehow continued on with Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody #2 and Joseph Haydn’s Piano Trio No. 39 in G Major, but I was wiped out. The Bartok, de Sarasate, Ravel’s sketchbooks, Brahms four hands – it was a lot to take in and take home on a Monday night.

That’s not to say I didn’t get up the next day and listen to my vinyl copy of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances for Piano 4 Hands, bought used at Vintage Vinyl ($3.99!) – the first batch of 10 songs fits on side one, the second batch of 11 songs fits on side two – but, clearly, I have a Brahms problem.

Chamber Music Society of St. Louis announce their next season at this concert. Visit https://chambermusicstl.org.

The post Chamber Music Society dances with Brahms, Bartok, Ravel appeared first on St. Louis American.