Wister Quartet's "Summer Bits and Pieces'

The Wister Quartet had to work shorthanded at its annual appearance in the "Concerts by Candlelight" series in the Laurel Hill mansion. The group's violist, Pamela Fay, was visiting her native Canada, where her daughter has maintained the family tradition and embarked on a career as a chamber music violist. The remaining three musicians responded with a "Summer Bits and Pieces" program that mingled light pleasure music, like the rolling polka that opened the evening, with forays into interesting byways.

As you might expect, the two Mozart selections combined both elements. Mozart's Playful Duet for two violins is a clever parlor trick, but it's also an impressive display of genius, not to mention a sweet piece to listen to.

Mozart's melody line can be played backward or forward, and the two versions always harmonize and always complement each other. So Nancy Bean and Davyd Booth placed a single sheet of music between them and played their violins from opposite ends of the score.

The other Mozart treat was the allegro from his E-flat divertimento for string trio. Mozart built the movement around a gay, swinging melody that receives several repetitions, but he surrounded the melody with other material that was just as inventive, thus carefully avoiding any danger that his listeners might get tired of hearing it.

Attacked as reactionary

Booth injected the most serious note with a Max Reger piece for unaccompanied violin. Although Reger composed in the dawn of the 12-tone movement, he stuck with the older forms and stubbornly ignored the attacks of critics who considered him hopelessly reactionary. Reger's Introduction and Phantasie displays his devotion to Bach's violin sonatas, but it also adds some 19th-Century lushness and drama. The second movement is a solemn invocation of the Dies Irae "Day of Wrath" theme from the Latin mass.

The Reger work also reminded me just how good a soloist Booth is. Booth is a mainstay of the Philadelphia Orchestra's second violin section who normally plays second violin with the Wister Quartet. He fills yet another subordinate role when he plays harpsichord accompaniments with the Amerita Chamber Players. But on this evening he assumed complete control of the situation when he stepped into the soloist's role, confronting Weger's difficulties with the controlled expressiveness of a master violinist.

Weger's final touch is a moving effect and a rousing display of technique. The soloist suggests the tolling of a bell by plucking a string with one finger while he continues to play the melody line.

Viola quandary

Violinist Nancy Bean, in her secondary capacity as a viola player, delved into musical technology when she displayed the odd-looking viola she has occasionally played at 1807 & Friends concerts.

The viola presents instrument makers with an inherent conflict. A large viola creates a richer, darker sound, but its long reach renders it harder to play. Bean's viola enlarges the sound box by adding two bulges that make it look like a curvy abstract sculpture.

The result is an instrument with a comfortable reach and a big, dark sound suitable for the Ferdinand Hummel Romance that Bean used as a demonstration piece. The viola came on so strong, in fact, that some of the cello accompaniment seemed irrelevant.

Arranging an arrangement

The Wister's third member, cellist Lloyd Smith, had his moments too, both as performer and arranger. The program's second item, a late 18th-Century duet by Tommaso Giordani, was a true dialogue, with violin and cello taking turns accompanying each other, and the cello declaiming the more romantic bits.

For the finale, Smith took a piano and violin arrangement of Manuel de Falla's popular Dance Espagnol and arranged it yet again for a string trio. Smith composed this trio with a sure sense as to which instrument should do what, producing a version that captured all the flair of the music that initiated this complex chain of transmutations.