By MARK SATOLA
SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio — Man does not live by Brahms alone; nor Beethoven, Mozart or Bach. The overwhelming prevalence of mainstream repertoire on concert programs denies audiences the salutary experience of encountering new and different ideas that can expand their appreciation of the inestimably wide spectrum of music.
Case in point: Tuesday night’s concert by the superlative Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet, with a program of works by Anton Reicha, Kalevi Aho, Gyorgy Ligeti and Carl Nielsen, an evening with nary a concert staple in sight, but one that informed, challenged, and delighted the listeners at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights.
Hornist Fergus McWilliams, who addressed the audience at various points in a lilting Scottish brogue (he being the non-German in the ensemble), noted that this was their fifth appearance with the Cleveland Chamber Music Society.
McWilliams was joined onstage by flutist Michael Hasel, oboist Andreas Wittmann, clarinetist Walter Seyfarth and bassoonist Marion Reinhard.
The program opened with a rarity by Reicha, a Bohemian in Vienna who was pals with Beethoven and Haydn. Reicha pretty much single-handedly established the woodwind quintet, much as his friend Haydn established the string quartet. Tuesday night’s opener was an Andante arioso in which the oboe is replaced by its lower-voiced brother, the English horn, which is given a central role in the proceedings.
Wittmann was graceful in the spotlight, shaping his phrases with excellent dynamics and supple rhythm. His mini-cadenza demonstrated his mastery of the instrument’s beautiful tone.
The Wind Quintet No. 2 by Finnish composer Kalevi Aho (b. 1949) was commissioned and premiered by the Berlin Quintet in 2014. A tough-minded work of near-symphonic stature lasting close to 40 minutes, the quintet was given an authoritative reading Tuesday night.
Aho expands the standard wind quintet to include parts for piccolo and alto flute, English horn and clarinets in the keys of A and B-flat, thereby increasing the sonorous possibilities for his highly individual way with tonality and counterpoint.
The Berlin Quintet inhabited the score with technical skill and artistic verve. Of particular note was their reading of the brief but demanding second movement (“Very fast, wild”), which was a marvel of accurate ensemble playing and interpretive imagination.
Hungarian expat Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles are short but tart, combining humor, lyric beauty and more than one instance of playful rudeness. The Berlin Quintet’s reading was all that one could have asked for, especially the third piece, a pastoral interlude that looks forward to Ligeti’s “mechanical” pieces of the early 1970s.
Last up was Nielsen’s Wind Quintet in A major, a staple of the wind quintet repertoire but unfamiliar enough to provide a refreshing conclusion to an already refreshing program. Their Berlin Quintet was fully in its element here, rendering Nielsen’s highly idiosyncratic counterpoint with authority. The final Theme and Variations were especially fine in their hands, and hornist McWilliams gets an extra nod for his solo variation, which was played with intelligence and restrained tone.
The wind quintet, of course, is well-suited to humorous music, given its toot-and-tweet timbre, and Tuesday night’s encore, the rumbustious American Folk Suite by Kazimierz Machala, sent appreciative chuckles through the audience.
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