Seattle Chamber Music Society Summer Festival: An unforgettable opening night of Prokofiev

Concert review |

Some concerts have an unmistakable gravitational center, whose power pulls everything into its orbit.

On Wednesday, the opening night of the fourth annual Seattle Chamber Music Society Summer Festival at Overlake School, that center of gravity belonged to cellist Amit Peled and pianist Adam Neiman as they turned Prokofiev's Sonata for Cello and Piano in C Major into an inspired madhouse of sound. Definitely not for the faint of heart, this hard-to-play and hard-to-love piece was made unforgettable by superb musicianship.

Peled is a colossus of a man — easily 6-foot-6 — and his cello seems a toy in his hands. Neiman is not tiny either, but the two men could not be more different as players. Peled is an introspective cellist with minimal gesticulation, brooding over his instrument with occasional tosses of his dark curls. Neiman — a lean and elegant figure at the keyboard — performs with high drama, infusing a heady effervescence into all his interpretations.

The stylistic contrast between the two players suited the Prokofiev perfectly, especially during the lunatic-fringed second movement, when the cello dives into a deep end of strained textures and motifs while the piano twitters with mad glee. My favorite movement — as well as the audience's — was the first, which opens with the cello making thorny, agonized rumblings in the basement registers while the piano tries to soothe it with perfumy riffs. Somehow, this odd pairing flowers into a black rose of a melody, beautiful but disturbing, that ends with the cello cooing almost like a cuckoo. The result made you wish you could clap between movements — and some folks did.

The other two pieces on the program, the opening Dvorak Terzetto and the closing Elgar Quintet, are not lightweight pieces by any means, but they seemed like guilty pleasures compared to the Prokofiev. The rustic, twangy fiddling and pizzicatos in the Terzetto brought to mind banjos and bluegrass, and it was great fun to hear the two violins (Joseph Lin and Ida Levin) and viola (a fantastic Richard O'Neill) toss the melody back and forth, sometimes like a hot potato, sometimes with great reluctance.

The stately and somber Elgar Quintet for Piano and Strings in A minor ended the evening by filling the hall with symphonic swells of sound. Violist Richard O'Neill and cellist Robert deMaine shone during the Adagio, and the entire ensemble was marvelously attuned to each other during the closing Andante. Violinists Erin Keefe and Scott Yoo twinned each other like silvery wraiths while cellist deMaine trailed as their shadow and violist O'Neill spun dark filigrees. Behind them all, pianist Anton Nel provided them with a gorgeous, limpid background sweetness that occasionally burst into glistening runs of virtuosity. A powerful end to a powerful evening.

Sumi Hahn: sumi@bewodo.org