Dolce Suono: Triumph of the winds

Triumph of the winds

TOM PURDOM

Composer Jeremy Gill added a new laurel to his bio at the latest Dolce Suono concert: Fastest Page Turner in the East. Gill turned pages for Susan Nowicki during the final sextet for winds and piano, and the Dolce Suono gang launched into an opening so exuberantly fast that Gill seemed to be jumping out of his seat every 15 seconds.

This seems to be my year to reassess my attitude toward the wind quintet. For the third time this year, I felt there’s more to the genre than I’d thought. The two other occasions were both Orchestra 2001 events: the recent concert with the Imani Winds and a January program that featured one of Ligeti’s fascinating experiments.

So I’ll admit it: I’ve underestimated the wind quintet. In appropriate hands, the wind quintet can produce an interplay of tone colors and well-defined instrumental voices that puts it in a class by itself compared to other standard ensembles. The three reed instruments— the oboe, the clarinet, and the bassoon— all possess distinctive personalities, and the flute and horn add silver and brass to the mix. But much depends on the players and the composers. In this case, five live-wire young musicians attacked works by four composers who had really grasped the possibilities of the genre.

Brahms in his autumn vein

Dolce Suono’s founder, flutist Mimi Stillman, is currently combining a busy musical career with a doctoral program in history at Penn. She switched into her academic mode at the end of the opening number and quickly sketched in the history of the wind quintet. The ensemble emerged at the beginning of the 19th Century, when the wind instruments assumed most of their modern form. The composer who established it, Anton Reicha, wrote 24 wind quintets.

The second item on the program was the 20th entry in Reicha’s inventory. Overall, Reicha built the quintet around a parade of solos, duos and trios. A new combination seized the spotlight every two or three minutes while the rest of the instruments shifted to a lower volume and provided an accompaniment. The moods included a processional fanfare, a jaunty minuet, a touch of Brahms in his autumn vein, and a suggestion of the mock-pompous at the end.

Stillman as talent scout

The rest of the program was just as varied. For the finale, the quintet added Susan Nowicki’s piano to the festivities and played the aforementioned sextet, a 1939 piece by Francis Poulenc that evoked smoky nightclubs, Parisian traffic and other historically appropriate moods.

One of the less-heralded blessings of the local music scene is the number of gifted accompanists and chamber pianists based in Philadelphia. Susan Nowicki is primarily a vocal coach in the Curtis Opera Department, so we don’t get many chances to hear her. But she belongs in the same league as more familiar regional assets such as Charles Abramovic and Lyric Fest’s Laura Ward.

Nowicki is a good example of Mimi Stillman’s ability to recruit top local musicians for this series. Stillman has a phenomenal knowledge of who’s who and what they can do. Dolce Suono is an exceptionally lively chamber series that features some of the best musicians in the region playing programs that are packed with surprises and pleasures. And it’s free. Did you hear that? Free.