Inventive program, superbly played, opens Mimir Chamber Music Festival

FORT WORTH — Always a welcome distraction from July’s blazing heat, the Mimir Chamber Music Festival opened its 26th annual concert series Wednesday evening.

Mimir brings together musicians from major orchestras, chamber ensembles and conservatories for particularly inventive programs. In Texas Christian University’s intimate PepsiCo Recital Hall, concerts feel friendly and relaxed, but playing standards are always professional, and often outstanding. Offstage, the performers coach up-and-coming young chamber ensembles — this year, three string quartets and a piano trio — which also perform concerts.

Wednesday’s opening concert supplied superb performances of a repertory combination unlikely in any other area chamber music series. It opened with an early string quartet by the 18-year-old Richard Strauss, then presented a spicy set of Five Pieces for String Quartet by Erwin Schulhoff, one of too many gifted Jewish musicians slaughtered by the Nazis. After intermission came Brahms at his most serious: the C minor Piano Quartet (No. 3, Op. 60).

Strauss’ 1880 String Quartet in A major hardly hints at lush romanticism and sometime raw expressionism to come. No, in a classical four movement scheme, here he sounds like a descendant of Schubert and Mendelssohn — but an accomplished one.

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Violinists Jun Iwasaki and Stephen Rose, violist Joan DerHovsepian and cellist Brant Taylor served up the piece with unforced eagerness and charm, although Iwasaki — with admittedly the most demanding part — wasn’t quite a fastidious as his colleagues.

Schulhoff, a Prague native who lived from 1894 to 1942, experimented with quite a variety of musical styles. Dating from 1923, his Five Pieces for String Quartet sound like an edgier Czech parallel to Bartók’s transformations of Hungarian and Romanian folk songs and dances.

The movements are titled, respectively, Viennese Waltz, Serenade, Czech folk music, Tango and Tantarella. Whatever the international labels, though, the mischievously tart musical language is very much inter-war Middle European. Even the waltz is surprisingly earthy. Mimir executive director Curt Thompson performed as first violinist, with Rose, DerHovsepian and Taylor, in an aptly feisty account of the pieces.

The mental disintegration and institutionalization of Brahms’ friend and champion Robert Schumann weighed heavily on first sketches for what would become Brahms’ C minor Piano Quartet. Although he wouldn’t return to it and complete it for another 20 years, the work still feels suffused with sadness.

Even the scherzo, usually a lighter-hearted movement, is harmonically and rhythmically restless. The finale only intermittently disperses the clouds.

This is music at its most deeply felt, and pianist John Novacek joined Rose, DerHovsepian and Taylor in a gripping performance. Novacek’s touch was occasionally too hard, and too aggressive, but he shaped the music most expressively. In an age of too much string overplaying in chamber music concerts, never all evening was this an issue.

Details

Mimir Chamber Music Festival runs through July 13 with performances at TCU’s PepsiCo Recital Hall and the Kimbell Art Museum’s Renzo Piano Pavilion, both in Fort Worth. $10 and $35; discounts for students and seniors. 817-984-9299, mimirfestival.org.