The Rembrandt Chamber Players began their 22nd season Sunday afternoon at Evanston’s Music Institute of Chicago in a fresh program that examined the age-old issue of poetry in music.
The concert was dedicated to the memory of supporter Connie O’Kieffe, though it also would have honored violist Keith Conant, one of the group’s founding members who died last week.
Their passing did not, however, cast a pall over the music-making. Scores by Dominick Argento, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Franz Schubert came across with great force, too great, in fact, owing partly to acoustical properties of the venue.
Nichols Hall is a revealing room in which half a dozen musicians performing moderately loudly create a hard, gleaming din. Everything has to be scaled down, which was not the case on Sunday. So there was a wearying magnification throughout that emphasized small things such as the occasional fuzz around Robert Morgan’s oboe tone and rarely permitted a sound quieter than mezzo-forte from soprano Christine Brandes.
Withstanding this best were Argento’s six “Elizabethan Songs,” which bubbled and bounded despite over-inflation, disappointing mainly in slower sections. Brandes achieved delicacy in the floating “Sleep,” before again becoming outsize in tone and manner. Inwardness is not essential to the music, allowing it to have effect even at a pumped-up scale with heightened coloration.
Vaughan Williams’ 10 “Blake Songs,” mostly duets for oboe and voice, were another matter. William Blake’s poems require hypersensitive word painting along with refined shading from the oboe. On Sunday there was a generalized pastoral quality that came from hitting the right notes with the cold tone Americans often bring to British music.
The song that is the basis for the fourth movement of Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet had greater lightness than the Quintet itself, which was virtuosic, driving, even piercing until the variations and finale showed charm was not entirely out of reach of the ensemble.
The program will be repeated at 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Driehaus Museum, 40 E. Erie St.
