MUSIC REVIEWS : Santa Fe Ensemble Gives Strong Preview

COSTA MESA —  As a kind of advance party for the main event this summer, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival on Tour came to Founders Hall in Orange County Performing Arts Center Thursday night. If this concert is any indication, it should be one heck of a festival.

The five players--pianist James Tocco, violinists Ida Levin and Carmit Zori, violist Scott St. John and cellist Ronald Thomas--proved exceptional as individual musicians and single-minded in their three different ensemble configurations.

Their interpretations of a Beethoven-Schnittke-Schumann program were deeply considered and impeccably executed. There was a sense of these players listening not only to each other but, it seemed, to the unwinding of the musical narratives before them.

Which suited Schnittke’s theatrical though profoundly serious Piano Quintet perfectly. The 25-minute work from 1972-76 is the composer’s response to his mother’s death. As such, it could be expected to be both a downer and dull.

Not true. It is a great balancing act. Its message is at once cosmic and personal, its means banal and austere. A waltz appears and fades; a triumphant theme tries to break loose. Both are scraped away by a quarter-tone dissonant buzz. The music hovers and grinds its teeth, stays in one place and takes off into space. It is high Romanticism with a wheeze, a Mahler symphony, chamber-size.

It made Thursday’s audience sit quietly in expectation and in silence at the end. The players plumbed every ounce of it.

Beethoven’s ever-remarkable String Trio, Opus 9, No. 1 opened the program in a performance of Emersonian (as in the Quartet) polish and intensity. Schumann’s Piano Quartet closed it no less impressively, Tocco’s oversized (and over-pedaled) presence notwithstanding.