East Coast Chamber Orchestra at the Perelman

Instrumental ensembles have a hard time of it in today's tough classical music world, where most attention goes to the solo performer, the string quartet or the full-size symphony orchestra. Not many works are written expressly for 18 string players, and so the East Coast Chamber Orchestra is often called upon to produce a bigger sound to compass its repertory. Yet this splendid string ensemble of young musicians thrives on these challenges. In their debut at the Perelman, they gave a rousing and vigorous concert that included two of the 20th Century's finest works.

Like the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the East Coast group is conductorless and rotates its solo roles among its members. This is a further challenge, requiring intense concentration and coordination, and a democratic agreement about interpretation. The East Coast Chamber is thus a kind of traveling town hall meeting of musicians. Not exactly a jam session, but everyone looks to be having fun.

Part's signature piece

The Perelman program began with Arvo Part's Fratres, which replaced the announced four-part Fantasias of Henry Purcell. Fratres has become a signature piece for Part in the way the Adagio for Strings was for Samuel Barber, and has been presented in various instrumental garbs.

This one featured a skittish violin solo that segued into a minimalist recitative with strong overtones of Orthodox-sounding monody. Fratres shows that even minimalism can be made to yield results in the hands of a talented composer with expressive ambitions.

The concert's second half warmed up with an infectious performance of Mozart's Divertimento in F, K. 138 (miscatalogued as K. 135 in the Chamber Music Society's season program— that's an opera, folks). The youthful Wolfgang, all of 15, is pure sunshine in this brief, delightful work.

Britten's forgotten teacher

The program's major offerings, one in each half, were Britten's Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge, Op. 10, and Bartok's Divertimento for Strings. Britten was himself only 23 when he wrote the Variations; Bridge had been his teacher, and despite his own considerable merits as a composer, he was to be so far eclipsed by his star pupil that his reputation has only now begun to recover.

The Variations is a virtuoso piece that fully exploits string potential while exploring a mercurial variety of moods and styles. The Perelman audience, with no listing of the individual variations on the program, seemed not to know where the piece might end, interrupting the performers three times with premature applause.

Premonition of tragedy

At least the crowd was silent after the eighth variation— a searing dirge that showed, for the first time, the deep vein of emotion that lay close to the surface of Britten's art. This was followed by an icily intense chant and a tricky fugue that brought the work to a full-throated but somber close. It was as if the young Britten, happily sowing his compositional oats, was suddenly caught up by a premonition of tragedy— a premonition that was certainly in the air in the Europe of 1937.

The program concluded with Bartok's Divertimento for Strings, written just on the cusp of World War II in 1939. It's normally considered one of Bartok's "lighter" and more accessible works, at least in its outer movements, but here it was given a strong, urgent reading throughout that brought out its darker and at times even sinister currents. I'll certainly never hear this piece the same way again.