May 11, 2006
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Mozart the fugue-writer
The Washington Post 5/11/06:  If you like your music passionate to the point of incandescence, you belonged at the Freer Gallery on Tuesday night for the last of this season’s three “Musicians from Marlboro” concerts.  The program  opened with Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue in C Minor, K. 546 for string quartet, and the Adagio has all the pretty, gracile wit you expect from Mozart -- so let’s just move impatiently to the astounding fugue that follows. It may have been written as an exercise, but the Marlboro players built it into a white-hot juggernaut of relentless power, magnificent in its disdain for mere melody, and almost too vast and pitiless to be contained in the human head.

Once the stage cooled, the fine young baritone Charles Mays, Jr. delivered a fresh and colorful account of Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe song-cycle, op. 48, bringing a finely tuned sense of irony to this often over-dramatized work. Good as he was, though, Mays was nearly upstaged by accompanist Ieva Jokubaviciute, who nailed every note with coiled, razor-sharp intelligence and wit.

But the best was saved for last. Before he was crowned the Darth Vader of modern music, Arnold Schoenberg was a full-fledged Romantic, and his string sextet known as Verklarte Nacht has at least one foot firmly in the 19th Century. Its lush emotional landscape can be suffocating in the wrong hands, but the Marlboro players, led by the prodigiously-talented violinist Susie Park, gave a reading of it that was so detailed, so passionate and so convincing that it left the audience gasping helplessly for breath – a superb performance in every way.