NYT: A Hip Basement Plays Host to Mozart and Mendelssohn

[Frank Forman]

A Hip Basement Plays Host to Mozart and Mendelssohn
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/arts/music/camerata-rco-joins-the-pianist-weiyin-chen-at-subculture.html

Camerata RCO Joins the Pianist Weiyin Chen at SubCulture
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

SubCulture, the inviting performance space on Bleecker Street that
celebrates its first anniversary this week, combines elements of a
downtown basement music club with a traditional 120-seat recital
hall. A welcoming bar serves drinks and snacks, but not during
performances, which distinguishes SubCulture from Le Poisson Rouge,
the other, very popular basement performance space on Bleecker
Street.

SubCulture has made a special effort to attract classical audiences.
This season the New York Philharmonic will again present three of
its Contact! programs of contemporary music at SubCulture, in
collaboration with the 92nd Street Y.

The place was packed on Saturday night for a program in SubCulture's
second annual PianoFest, a series of concerts over 18 days
presenting pianists and composers of wide-ranging styles. On this
occasion the featured artist was the appealing young
Taiwanese-American pianist Weiyin Chen, a thoughtful, lyrical and
accomplished artist, who performed works by Mozart and Mendelssohn
with Camerata RCO, an ensemble whose members are players in the
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. (This is the first in a
series of three programs Ms. Chen will present at SubCulture this
season.)

Though it's rewarding to hear classical music at SubCulture, the
proprietors have to tend better to details. The program book had an
extensive biography of Ms. Chen, but did not even give the names of
the Camerata players. Nor was there any information about the works
being presented, not even a list of movements.

Ms. Chen ceded the stage to her colleagues on this evening to open
the program with Mozart's Allegro for Clarinet and String Quartet in
B flat. This little-heard work is a substantial fragment from around
1787, of a movement from what was probably going to be a full-length
piece. (It was played here in a version completed by the pianist and
scholar Robert D. Levin.) The Camerata players, especially the fine
clarinetist Hein Wiedijk, gave a warm, glowing performance of this
mellow, often intricate music.

Then Ms. Chen, joined by a quartet of strings and double bass,
played Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 12 in A (K. 414) as a chamber
work. The original orchestral version is already intimate, scored
for just two oboes, two horns and strings, and it works beautifully
as a chamber piece. The hallmarks of Ms. Chen's performance were the
singing quality of her sound and her attentiveness to inner voices
and harmonic shadings. This was not the most pristine Mozart
playing. Still, I was captivated by its breadth and warmth, and the
easy interplay between Ms. Chen and the ensemble.

Mendelssohn composed his Concerto for Violin, Piano and Strings as a
teenager. You hear hints of Bach and Mozart, strands of Italian
opera, the virtuosic piano music of the day and more in this teeming
35-minute piece. The piano and violin share bursts of virtuosic
passagework, brilliantly dispatched here by the dynamic violinist
Marc Daniel van Biemen and Ms. Chen, at her nimble-fingered best.
The second movement is searching and lovely; the finale, a rousing
dance.

For an encore, Ms. Chen again turned the stage over to the Camerata
players, who performed a beguiling arrangement for clarinet and
string quintet (with double bass) of the slow movement from Brahms's
Sonata in F minor for Clarinet and Piano. After the concert, many
audience members gathered at the bar to have a drink and meet the
artists, a SubCulture tradition.

The next PianoFest program presents Gregg Kallor on Tuesday night at
SubCulture, 45 Bleecker Street, near Lafayette Street, East Village;
212-533-5470, subculturenewyork.com. The series continues through
Sept 27.