Seven outstanding classical instrumentalist with various connections both to UCSD’s Department of Music and with the San Diego Symphony presented a collaborative concert of chamber works at the Neurosciences Institute. The obvious audible virtuosity of their playing was given further testimonial by the evidence of impressive credit-crammed biographies, which took up most of the space in the printed program, with no room granted to any notes about the music and its composers, save a bare listing of the pieces and their formal or tempo divisions. Nor were the players themselves individually introduced or identified to the audience in any way. Although it was clear enough who played viola, oboe, and piano – there only having been one of each – sorting out the pairs of cellists and violinists required a slight effort of guesswork and elimination similar to a game of "Clue."

That done, one could simply enjoy excellent playing of some interesting and often passionate chamber music. The three composers represented – Britten, Mendelssohn, and Brahms – were very familiar, the three pieces not as much so. I, at least, had not encountered these works before and was glad to hear some new things – new to me – from these well-known masters.

The "Phantasy Quartet for Oboe and String Trio" by Benjamin Britten (1913-76) is, however, hardly a very recent composition: his Opus 2 – one of the composer’s earliest mature works, written at eighteen, which brought him his first foreign recognition when it was performed in 1934 at the Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Florence. The antiquarian spelling of "Phantasy" comes from the enthusiast of early music Walter Willson Cobbet who in 1907 started offering annual prizes to encourage a modern revival of something similar to Elizabethan viol fantasias, a form which combined several episodes with different time signatures into a single piece. Britten, as a student, had previously won that prize for a Phantasy String Quintet, and, liking the form, the Quartet soon followed.

Dwight Parry (oboe), Che-Yen Chen (viola), Charles Curtis (cello), and Jeff Thayer (violin) gave an attractive reading of this inventive piece which, although theoretically derived from Cobbet’s notion of the old form, partook clearly of the heyday of 20^th century Modernism from which it truly sprang. Maintaining characteristic distance from a clear tonal center, the work symmetrically began and ended in march tempos. The combination of military march and strings along with that Modernist sound invoked memories of "Histoire du Soldat" (1918) by Stravinsky – a Britten influence of which his more staid English contemporaries tended to disapprove. (More fitting were it then for a young British musician to fall under the sway of Purcell, which Britten to an extent did, or Vaughan Williams, which he didn’t much.) As the march, initially played by muted strings, first advanced from a dry sonic distance, and then at the finale diminished back towards silence, one might have thought of Stravinsky’s soldier coming and going down his dusty road.

The sections flowed together, fantasia-like, with no clear pauses or demarcations, progressing through a number of themes and tempi. The oboe played some long, sinuous, tricky Allegro passages over the pizzicato strings, with the double-reed instrument’s usual pastoral associations. As the Phantasy shifted to an Andante tempo, the oboe fell tacit. (This gave the player an opportunity oboists seldom decline – to disassemble his instrument and give it a good cleaning out.) The viola was granted a slow lyrical passage, with the reassembled oboe following similarly before the return to the concluding march-time.

The String Quartet in A Minor, Opus 13, composed by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-47) also at age eighteen, is considered a work from the mature period of this precocious composer (a Wunderkind comparable to Mozart). Again with Jeff Thayer (the San Diego Symphony’s concertmaster) playing the first violin part, Alexander Palamidis (the Symphony’s principle second violin) joining him, Yao Zhao on cello (associate principle cellist of the Symphony), and Che-Yen Chen (principle Symphony violist) also returning, this combination, by a simple process of ratiocination, clearly had to have been the advertised San Diego Symphony String Quartet, although no one ever came out and said so.

They played with classical precision and romantic fervor, appropriate to Mendelssohn whose affinities ranged from Bach to the usual influences of early Romanticism. The customary four movements began with a tune in slow chorale style, hymn-like but lush, immediately accelerating into an agitated and impassioned allegro vivace. The second, adagio non lento, started off lyrically, leading to a short canon, and gradually building in emotional intensity and some urgency (but not too much speed). The minor key lent a serious, tense atmosphere which then eased into a return to the song-like mood for a gentle conclusion. The third movement – marked Intermezzo: Allegro con moto – contained Mendelssohn’s most typical crowd-pleasing elements, what Sir George Grove called "the airy-fairy lightness, and the peculiar youthful grace," also found in his "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" Overture (1826) and Octet (1825) of the same period. It commenced in stately dance tempo, something like a gavotte, which gave way to a contrasting section, light and quick with soaring, singing melody rising above it. The slow dance then returned, with a brief coda that returned to the swift featherstitching figure. The final movement – Presto – alternated between a wild gypsy-like fiddle melody, mainly carried by Thayer’s violin (a 1708 Stradivarius), joined with furiously by the rest in a galloping, melodramatic, nearly hysterical mood, and gentler interspersed songlike passages. A penultimate Tzigane solo yielded to another slow gentle chorale coda (somewhat marred by a front and center cougher who seemed to inspire antiphonal coughs from the back that carried with clarity in the acoustically perfect auditorium).

After these two youthful works, the concert concluded with a very late and mature piece by Johannes Brahms (1833-97), his Trio in A Minor for Pianoforte, Clarinet (or Viola) and Violoncello, Opus 114 (1891). For this performance, the viola option was of course taken and very ably performed by Che-Yen Chen. (This redoubtable musician was the only one of the magnificent seven to perform in all three of the programmed works.) Whereas opting for viola instead of the usual clarinet may have sacrificed some extra color in this work, the substitution, especially in this performance, allowed Chen’s viola along with the cello, played with fervor by Charles Curtis, to engage as a rich, moody, complementary duo, either together or seeming to extend the range of long melodies as they seamlessly traded off passages, creating the effect of some single super string instrument. The piano part, largely supportive and foundational in this work, was excellently played by Aleck Karis.

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