Lex-traordinary! Amadeus Lex dazzles on Friday night
A triumph of tone and precision reigned Friday night when Amadeus Lex played at Union Church before a sizable crowd.
Crosmer
The program began with the eminently listenable prelude from the work, Spring Suite, composed by the group’s founder, violist, Jonathan Crosmer. An intricate work for solo violin, soloist Sila Darville freely intoned the bright, sometimes edgy, lines of the piece, and was earnest in her performance.
Evocative of Bach’s solo works for cello, with their architectural precision, Darville meticulously phrased each measure, as layer by layer, they were stacked together into a house of sound.
The overall effect was that of creating a safe space within which to ponder something vexing but also compelling. Ultimately, the fraught internal dialogue resolved, landing on something akin to carefully parsed optimism, which was satisfying.
After the concert, in a brief interview, Crosmer said he’d had Bach’s violin partitas in mind when he composed the piece. Crosmer’s work does share the interiority of Bach’s partitas, but also communicates a freneticism that Bach in his day would never have experienced, much less effect in his scores. Crosmer’s prelude is contemporary in that way.
Mozart
The quartet demonstrated its impeccable timing in Mozart’s Piano Quartet No. 2 in E-flat major, K. 493. While mastering the multiple runs Mozart crammed into this blistering score, Madeline Rogers at the piano provided a solid, utterly dependable foundation for her equally virtuosic counterparts as together, they conjured the bold tapestry of this difficult work into existence.
Schumann
Written during one of his more stable periods, the final work on the program was Robert Schumann’s Piano Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 47.
It was the highlight of the night.
As Darville shared with the audience, Schumann is thought to have suffered with bipolar disorder, although that his friend and colleague Johannes Brahms was having an affair with his wife, Clara, right in Schumann’s own house certainly couldn’t have helped to stabilize this romantic composer.
This work was written early in his marriage to Clara, a composer and virtuosic pianist in her own right, who wasn’t as interested in being a stay-at-home wife as her husband had expected. This created friction during an otherwise healthy time for Schumann.
Not considered one of his more confessional works, it still feels acutely personal, beginning almost breezily but with a sense of trying just a little too hard not to let his troubles bring him down, until the final Vivace when it feels like enough is enough and he’s going to be happy, dammit.
The yearning beneath the faux cheer in this piece is what hurts your heart to hear, but with cellist (and Sila’s husband) Luke Darville’s wistful but anguished tone during the Andante, the effect was utterly heartbreaking, and pointed the way clearly to Mahler’s haunting adagios yet to come at the end of the century and into the next.
Schumann’s pathos channeled through Luke Darville’s cello brought this reviewer to tears.
Amadeus Lex
Sila Darville is an assistant professor of violin and viola at Eastern Kentucky University. Luke Darville directs the orchestra program at Model Laboratory Schools in Richmond. Crosmer is currently studying law at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, Mo. Rogers is an assistant professor of keyboard studies at Berea College. Crosmer and Rogers are co-artistic directors of Amadeus Lex.
The concert was held at Union Church on Friday, March 14, at 7 PM. Running time was about 90 minutes. The concert was sponsored in part by Berean Charles Hoffman, Atty-at-law. Sponsors from Lexington include Charles L. Papp, MD; Timothy Gregg, MD; and the Tylark Corporation.