There was an undeniable sense of transition to Sunday’s concert by the Georgian Chamber Players as the group opened its first proper season since the passing of its founder, cello luminary and Atlanta Symphony Orchestra fixture Christopher Rex.
With a supergroup roster of talent mostly associated with the ASO, the concert at Peachtree Road United Methodist Church was a concise and pleasant affair, a forum for an exchange of musical conversations among top shelf players.
The afternoon began in an unassuming fashion with pianists Julie Coucheron and Elizabeth Pridgen performing a duet of Felix Mendelssohn’s Andante and Allegro Brillante, Op. 92.
A work intended to strike a hard contrast between the melodic and the virtuostic, Andante and Allegro Brillante provides fertile ground for the combined skills of Pridgen and Coucheron — who have by now shared the four-handed piano format so many times that it feels as though they operate off of a shared consciousness. In that communal headspace they were able to capture Mendelssohn’s precarious balance between technique and fun for a gentle but upbeat opening to the afternoon’s concert.
The second piece, Johannes Brahms’ Viola and Piano Sonata No. 2 in E flat major, Op. 120, No.20, was a marked shift in tone and one chosen, as Coucheron explained later, as a darker contrast to the Mendelssohn pieces that bookended it.
The performance afforded listeners the opportunity to appreciate Pridgen as a soloist. Her naturally strong hand served the music of Brahms well: his is a darkly deliberate and thundering style that, even in lighter moments such as these, casts dark clouds across otherwise blue and clear skies.
Center stage for the Brahms, however, was the stellar performance of violist Zhenwei Shi, a native of China who joined the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in 2019 as principal violist and exemplifies the informal alliance between the Georgian Chamber Players and the symphony.
Shi captured well the darkly tense nature of Brahms melodies — he is a musician unafraid to dig deep into the brash, gut wrenching depths that Brahms sought to explore. Shi is still a young man proving himself despite an already accomplished performance history, but he displayed a depth of maturity beyond his years in his sonorous interpretation of Brahms.
Brahms’ Viola and Piano Sonata No. 2 is a piece apart from itself. Originally written for clarinet and dedicated to his friend, clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, the reinterpretation for viola remains a popular staple of chamber performances to this day.
The critical question becomes just how well the violist in question can emote phrases originally intended for a woodwind instrument. To this end, Shi was careful to accentuate his longer notes in the center of the tone, a stylistic choice that feels like a carryover from the clarinet’s breath oriented tonality. It is that kind of attention to detail and nuance that marks a great musician.
The final, and longest, work of the afternoon saw a return to the more playful pastures of Mendelssohn with Concerto for Piano, Violin and Strings in D Minor and with it a renewed interest in the role of cellist within the group. That role was, for the afternoon, filled by ASO acting principal cellist Daniel Laufer as a stopgap for original Rex replacement Rainer Eudeikis, who remains out of pocket due to his recent work with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.
Joining Laufer were Coucheron on piano, her brother and ASO concertmaster David Coucheron on violin, double bassist Joseph McFadden and additional violin support from Justin Burns and Kevin Chen.
The Concerto for Piano, Violin and Strings in D minor sits nicely among Mendelssohn’s catalogue of cheerful, layman friendly melodicism. It bears particular distinction for having been written while the composer was a lad of 14. That youthfulness is readily apparent in the work which has a sort of academic minimalism in the accompanying instruments — they mostly move together and seldom intersect in any dynamic ways that could distract from the melody line.
Laufer’s role was a passive one although he had a sense of deliberate space in his pacing — a subdle restraint that balanced him well among his other counterparts. Top honors for the performance go to David Coucheron whose tonaly rich performance saw him delve into a deeper degree of sonic detail than what he is normally afforded by the acoustic vastness of Symphony Hall.
The Georgian Chamber Players have returned in force for what promises to be a captivating season even as the search for a permanent cellist remains unresolved. The ensemble will return January 29 at First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta.
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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.
