Review: Georgian Chamber Players show why Eddie’s Attic is classically perfect

The Georgian Chamber Players took the stage Wednesday night at Eddie’s Attic, the legendary Decatur venue for acoustic music. It was an unorthodox choice of location for a classical music concert, but one that paid off in satisfying ways.

Since 1991, the cozy upstairs confines of Eddie’s Attic has been a go-to hotspot for all things that fall under the umbrella of Americana music with the likes of Shawn Mullins, the Indigo Girls, John Mayer, Ani DiFranco and countless others who have performed there. The small corner stage and intimate ambiance make it the ideal location for acoustic concerts. Now efforts are underway to bring a regular return of classical music to Eddie’s Attic.

The Georgian Chamber Players — pianists Julie Coucheron and Elizabeth Pridgen, violinists David Coucheron and Justin Bruns, violist Zhenwei Shi and cellist Charae Krueger — took the stage before a packed and enthralled house. Enthusiasm in classical music is normally conveyed in the form of standing ovations at the close and displays of regal propriety. But this was a crowd full of cheers and whistles — the kind of visceral explosion from an audience seldom received by classical musicians. It was clear from the outset that this would be no ordinary chamber concert. 

The performance opened with a crowd pleaser: pianists Julie Coucheron and Elizabeth Pridgen playing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Sonata for Piano Four Hands in D Major, op. 6. The untraditional venue seemed to reveal something new in the piece: this was not merely a dry exercise in artistry on the part of Mozart, it was a fiery display of showmanship meant to electrify an audience.

The Coucheron/Pridgen duo then brought the mood down to a whisper with Johannes Brahms’ Hungarian Dances One and Five.

May 17 is Constitution Day in Norway, and the group marked it by including a piece from the Coucherons’ home country. David Coucheron and Charae Krueger played “Passacaglia,” Johan Halverson’s reimagining of an earlier work by George Fredric Handel. The piece maintained the evening’s established tone of furious virtuosity but through it all there was a tremendous sense of dialogue at work. The music felt less like a duet and more like two good friends existing in a shared harmonic space.

Krueger emerged as the evening’s most captivating soloist. She’s certainly an ever-present fixture throughout the Atlanta classical scene but her performance here was particularly enchanting. She had the opportunity to bite into some profoundly technical passages and did so with ravenous abandon. In the up-close and personal world of Eddie’s Attic, the tension in her vibrato and definition in her phrasing stood out in ways a concert hall can’t convey.

The final segment saw Krueger and David Coucheron joined by Julie Coucheron, Justin Bruns and Zhenwei Shi for Robert Schumann’s Quintet in E flat Major, Op. 47. The work is a sprawling epic and one that afforded the players plenty of opportunities to enjoy the upbeat energy from the audience that defined the evening. 

Shedding the detached, aristocratic aura of traditional classical venues served the music well and left the audience gloriously satiated. Julie Coucheron explained afterwards that the management at Eddie’s Attic is working to revive chamber concerts at the venue. If this performance is any indication, classical music has a welcome home at Eddie’s Attic.

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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.