Art of Elan Launches Its 18th Season of Vivd Chamber Music at the Mingei Museum

Art of Elan’s co-founder and Artistic Director Kate Hatmaker welcomed a full house audience Tuesday evening to the organization’s opening concert of its 18th season. An unusually engaging program of recent and mid-20th-century chamber music resonated comfortably in the Mingei International Museum’s recital hall, easily winning favor with Art of Elan’s loyal audience.

Bassist and composer Xavier Dubois Foley demonstrated that he knows how to exploit his instrument’s many sonic possibilities in Shelter Island, his 2021 virtuoso duet for violin and contrabass. Because Shelter Island deftly swings from easy-going tunes that could have been lifted from a bluegrass ballad to contrapuntal intricacies worthy of J. S. Bach’s Art of Fugue, the single-movement work requires the players’ finesse navigating disparate styles.

Violinist Wesley Precourt not only proved up to this challenge, but his glowing pianissimo themes in his instrument’s highest register were nonpareil. Bassist Aaron Blick comfortably moved from animated pizzicato themes in his lowest range to suave cantilenas in the bass’s rarely engaged soprano register. Demonstrating that opposites in an instrumental family attract, the two musicians created a bracing ensemble filled with sophisticated agile interplay.   

In La Jolla SummerFest 2023 we encountered Paul Wiancko both as cellist and as composer, notably in his inventive 2016 Closed Universe for Solo Cello, Piano Quartet, and Glockenspiel. Art of Elan’s Wiancko offering, the composer’s 2012 Toy Bricks, also featured a pair of cellos, and, in retrospect, Toy Bricks may have been the prototype for his more elaborate 2016 creation. In the meticulously structured etude Toy Bricks, Alex Greenbaum and Andrew Hayhurst clearly relished their roles as dueling cellists trading the composer’s rambunctious, jazz-inflected themes while violinist Hanah Stuart and bassist Aaron Blick cheered them on with discrete, puckish commentary.

Jacques Ibert’s virtuoso 1936 Pièce for solo flute may be described as an Expressionist reconsideration of Claude Debussy’s classic flute solo Syrinx from 1913. Fortunately, Rose Lombardo’s heavenly tone was undaunted by Ibert’s demanding embellishments and wide-ranging themes.

Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera was arguably the leading South American composer of the mid-20th Century, and his 1948 String Quartet No. 1, Op. 20, reveals a propitious integration of vivid nationalist folkloric influences with strict neoclassical structural organization. Having spent the two years prior to writing this string quartet studying with Aaron Copland in the U.S. surely accounts for the quartet’s neoclassical rigor.

Art of Elan’s string quartet–violinists Wesley Precourt and Kate Hatmaker, violist Hanah Stuart, and cellist Alex Greenbaum–gave a thrilling account of Ginastera’s Op. 20, savoring its driving, assertive themes and mastering his complex textures at the unforgiving tempos he demanded: “Allegro violento ed agitato,” “Vivacissimo.” amnd “Allegramente.” Only the third movement, “Calmo e poetico,” gave these players respite, providing a poetic, mysterious interlude of plangent laments from the low voices and pianissimo glissandos from the upper strings. That the touring string quartets routinely ignore this gem is really unforgivable.

This program was presented by Art of Elan at Balboa Park’s Mingei International Museum on Tuesday, October 15, 2024.