Reviews

Music Fest's chamber concert a musical feast

By Jeff Johnson
Post and Courier Reviewer
Saturday, February 2, 2008

The Charleston Music Fest's three-day chamber music celebration is billing itself as an "extravaganza," and the second concert Friday at the Simons Center for the Arts at the College of Charleston certainly lived up to that title.

The program was well-planned with the first section introducing the performers in duets. First, cellists Robert deMaine and Natalia Khoma in a series of dance melodies by Francois Couperin (le Grande) combined the delicacy, grace and gravitas that pleased the court of France's sun king.

Then violinists Lee-Chin and Katharine Gowers gave a chillingly beautiful rendition of Prokofiev's Sonata for Two Violins, Op. 56. Written in the 1930s, Prokofiev's piece demands that the violins soar to the highest possible tones and then swoop down to the bottom of the instrument's range. It's fiendishly difficult, but Lee-Chin and Gowers gave an intensely dramatic performance.

DeMaine and pianist Peter Takacs closed the first half of the concert with a sensual performance of Debussy's Sonata for Cello and Piano. Both artists captured the shimmering, impressionistic quality that Debussy felt was the ultimate beauty of modern French music.

After the intermission, Gowers, Lee-Chin, deMaine and Takacs were joined by Toby Appel on viola to perform Schumann's Piano Quintet in E flat Major Op. 44.

Thanks to the acoustics of the Recital Hall, all of the wonderful textures of the work were clearly heard by the attentive audience.

The festival concludes at 4 p.m. Sunday at Ashley Hall.