Three concerts by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society

The Tuesday night all-Schubert songfest featured two vocal stars who combine thriving opera careers with a devotion to chamber singing: soprano Susanna Phillips and bass-baritone Eric Owens. Both can apply operatic power to a song without sacrificing chamber-style nuance and intimacy, but for me their musical prowess underpinned a more important virtue — most of the pieces on the program were songs about subjects I could relate to.

Heroic defiance

Schubert set hundreds of poems to music. Many of them were standard German Romantic outpourings about unhappy people who seem to be unhappy mostly because it gives them an irresistible opportunity to emote. His setting of Goethe’s Prometheus, on the other hand, is a powerful, operatic expression of a heroic defiance of the gods.

Eric Owens captured all that frenzied defiance in a performance worthy of a major bass aria in a major opera. In the first item on the program, Owen produced an equally moving performance with a song about parting, “On the River.” The subject may be less heroic than Prometheus’s outburst, but it’s a universal experience and Schubert gave it a poignant, soberly resigned musical setting.

“Du Bist die Ruh (You Are Peace)” is one of the world’s great love songs, and Susanna Phillips sang it with a touching reverence, floating into the arch of the melody line and hitting a high note packed with emotion. Her other songs included a folky romp on the faithlessness of men, a hymn to spring, and another tender love song, “With You Alone.”

The finale for the evening, the Shepherd on the Rock, could be considered an Unhappy Shepherd piece but the dancing ode to spring at the end brought the program to a satisfactory close, with some critical help from the clarinet accompaniment played by Ricardo Morales.

A musical conversation

On Friday, PCMS hosted the Emerson Quartet, whom many consider the top string quartet in America. The quartet was founded in 1976, and you can hear the results of that long history in their conversational style. As the center of attention moves around the quartet, they usually sound like they’re responding to each other, instead of merely playing the next notes in the score.

The quartet played three pieces from the core of the string quartet repertoire. Interestingly, I found my personal reactions intensified as the program advanced through the eras. The opening Haydn sounded a bit mannered. The Beethoven quartet that followed seethes with tensions and inner conflicts that make any truly modern personality feel like they’re hearing from a kindred soul. The Ravel that closed the concert is a powerful 1903 work that always makes me think of the economy and force of the best prose written in the first decades of the 20th century. Ravel only wrote one string quartet, but it earned him a permanent high position in the repertoire.

Have horn, will travel

The Philadelphia Orchestra’s principal horn, Jennifer Montone, had a busy week. On Tuesday, she provided the haunting horn accompaniment that colored Eric Owens’s performance of “On the River.” Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, she led her Philadelphia Orchestra section through its part in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. And on Sunday, she joined pianist Anna Polonsky in a recital at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The horn is primarily an orchestra and outdoor band instrument, but its repertoire includes chamber works that exploit its capacity for poetry and hunting-horn zest. Montone opened her program with a tricky Baroque concerto by Telemann and followed it with a roster that included two appealing pieces by Schumann; a scene-painting frolic by Rossini; and the elegy Francis Poulenc wrote when the great British horn player, Dennis Brain, died in a car crash at the age of 36.

Brain’s 1953 monaural recording of the Mozart horn concertos is still considered the standard recording of the peak item in the horn repertoire. Poulenc’s response to his premature death is a powerful expression of anguish and regret. My fondness for Poulenc’s music increases every time I hear one of his works. This piece added several more points to his tally on my personal score card.

Collaborative music

No report on these events would be complete without a salute to Anna Polonsky and the accompanist at the Schubert program, Myra Huang. The piano accompaniment accounts for half the impact in most of Schubert’s songs, and it’s just as critical in most works for solo instruments.

Some contemporary music writers now refer to accompaniment as “collaborative music.” Some people think that’s another example of modern title inflation, but I disagree. It’s really an overdue recognition of a basic reality.