Chamber music

Jeewon Park, pianist
last night playing the
Mozart sonata, K.305 

Last night was the opening night of the Seattle Chamber Music Society's 35th Summer Festival.

Nine years ago, almost to the day, I wrote an ecstatic post about attending the festival, which was then held on the bucolic campus of the Lakeside School, near Seattle's northern city limits.  I frankly admitted that I was as enchanted by the campus as by the music itself.  A large number of non-paying attendees sat on the grass outside St. Nicholas Hall, eating picnics and listening to the concert from within on speakers that the festival thoughtfully provided.

Alas, since 2010, Lakeside has needed the venue for its own purposes.  The concerts are now held in the small performance auditorium in Benaroya Hall, in the heart of downtown.  Not so bucolic, not so relaxed, but significantly better acoustics.  And light rail conveys me from the UW station directly to the interior of Benaroya, a nice benefit in these days of crowded streets and expensive parking.

By the time I decided to get a ticket -- over a month ago -- there were only about three seats available for this opening performance.  One of them, fortunately, was in the third row from the stage.  The musicians were practically in my lap, their every move and expression available for my study.  (Except for the pianist, who -- because I was on the right side of the auditorium -- was hidden behind the piano.)

The festival started with a bang.  Just as the violinist in the first number (a Mozart sonata for piano and violin) put his bow to the strings, the phone of some forgetful member of the audience began ringing.  The phone's owner took an impressively long time to kill the phone -- which was probably deep in the guilty party's purse -- while the musicians paused with bemused smiles on their faces and the audience tittered nervously.

That was the one and only missed note of the evening.

Besides the opening Mozart sonata, the other numbers were a Schumann quartet for piano and strings, and one of the later Beethoven string quartets (No. 15).  All were beautifully and movingly performed, and I really couldn't have asked for a better seat. 

My only (small) complaint is that the tiny lobby space becomes extremely crowded, both before the performance and at the intermission.  Not like those days of yore, when we poured out into the summer twilight.  But that's a drawback I can live with.

The festival continues with eleven more concerts between now and the end of July.