Atlanta Chamber Players mark 50 years with a sublime premiere

Sunday, February 8, saw the Atlanta Chamber Players take the stage at First Presbyterian Church for a concert that commemorated its 50th concert season with a newly commissioned work by Grammy-nominated composer Andrea Casarrubios. The new work, bookended by Beethoven and Rachmaninoff, carried the afternoon well, even as the other pieces strained against the constricting walls of their minimalist nature.

Beethoven’s Piano Trio in C minor, Op. 1 No. 3, made for a fine opener with ACP regulars Helen Hwaya Kim (violin) and Elizabeth Pridgen (piano), joined by St. Paul Chamber Orchestra cellist Julie Albers. The trio did a solid job, even in the small-ensemble format, of capturing that stern, foreboding tone that is Beethoven’s signature, though it only presents sporadically. 

The Piano Trio in C minor finds the composer at an early stage in his development and, as such, owes a great debt to his influences, almost seeming to border on collaboration. There are long passages that echo Mozart’s playful whimsy while abandoning Beethoven’s square-jawed gravitas altogether. In this particular performance, Pridgen proved to be the glue that held the trio together — her tone is deft and gentle in a manner that felt reticent in the darker passages and prominent in the unorthodox lighter moments, all while never deviating from its own internal cohesion.

The centerpiece of the afternoon, the premiere of Sextet in G Minor by Casarrubios, quickly outshone the more conventional fare that buttressed it. Commissioned by the ACP with support from Nicholas and Anne-Marie Shreiber, the piece is a subtle meditation on the artistic life. I, for one, was relieved to see Casarrubios tackling more abstract subject matter. Her most well-known work, SEVEN, is one of a seemingly endless array of modern classical works inspired by the Covid years. Soulful as it may be, the topic has been done to death, and the last thing we need is another Fanfare for the Locked-Down Man.

The Sextet in G Minor saw Kim and Pridgen joined by Jesse McCandless (clarinet), Ryan Little (horn), Catherine Lynn (viola) and Isabel Kwon (cello). When I interviewed Pridgen, Kim and Lynn last summer, we talked about what they look for in a new work and they all maintained that “holding footballs,” a reference to works with long patches of sustained whole notes, was something they avoided.

That sentiment stayed with me as I evaluated the Sextet, because it seemed to have a great deal of those unwavering chordal washes that were so off-putting to the three ACP principals. That’s not to say that the piece itself was unenjoyable — far from it. Throughout the three movements of the broadly sweeping soundscape (called Herald, Pendulum and Harvest, respectively), the tones cascaded together in a gentle, dreamy manner that called to mind the soundtracks of Hildur Guðnadóttir and Jocelyn Pook. 

With the exception of the piano, which carried a great deal of the solo melodic content, the players in the Sextet willfully gave up their individual personalities and functioned more as a unified whole from which non-piano melodic passages emerged as tonal textures rather than specific instruments. The result was a work that seemed, in the most captivating way, to be warring internally as to whether or not it wanted to be a hopeful version of Barber’s Adagio or a melancholic take on Rhapsody in Blue. Either way, the work is by turns hopeful and foreboding and always engaging.

The afternoon’s second half was taken up entirely by Pridgen and Albers performing Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Sonata in G minor for Cello and Piano, Op. 19. The performance itself was impeccable — and allowed Albers to showcase stellar technique — but the duo instrumentation clashed with the sprawling nature of the piece. As such, the Sonata wears thin when taken as a whole. A couple of movements from the piece, along with a grand finale that saw the return of the afternoon’s full instrumentation, would have made for a stronger closer. As it stands, the afternoon ended on precarious footing.

Less than stellar ending aside, the ACP scored high with the Casarrubios premiere. Time and again, the Atlanta classical scene has proven to be a haven for modern works. The willingness to partake in that realm requires considerable boldness on the part of players and composers since the boundary between innovative brilliance and abstract nonsense is often wafer-thin (and highly subjective). But sometimes the payoff is sublime, and today was such a case.

The Atlanta Chamber Players will return March 8 for one of its subscriber exclusive “soirée” events at The Trolley Barn and a public concert at Ahavath Achim Synagogue on May 10. 

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Jordan Owen began writing about music professionally at the age of 16 in Oxford, Mississippi. A 2006 graduate of the Berklee College of Music, he is a professional guitarist, bandleader and composer. He is currently the lead guitarist for the jazz group Other Strangers, the power metal band Axis of Empires and the melodic death/thrash metal band Century Spawn.