The organization opened its season with a program encapsulating a persistently conservative vision of the repertory.
Out of the crucible of the past year and a half — a brutal pandemic, shuttered theaters, a renewed push for racial justice — major arts institutions have by and large emerged transformed, or at least chastened. Even in the persistently backward-looking classical music realm, there has been a sense of fresh beginnings, of the extension of earlier ventures toward the new and untried.
The Metropolitan Opera reopened with its first work by a Black composer. The New York Philharmonic has returned promising premieres and rarities — including, this week, a program of contemporary pieces on which John Adams’s Chamber Symphony, from 1992, is as close to the standard repertory as it gets. Go to Carnegie Hall or the 92nd Street Y, and on any given night you’re likely to hear something other than chestnuts.
Then there’s the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
This 52-year-old organization came back on Tuesday with a well played, depressing concert of Beethoven, Hummel, Schubert and Mendelssohn at Alice Tully Hall. Depressing because the program’s blinkered view of music encapsulates what the society has presented for some time — and what’s on the agenda for the rest of its season.
Of the nearly 100 works being offered on its main stage at Tully through next spring, just two are by living composers. One of those, George Crumb’s “Ancient Voices of Children,” was written over 50 years ago; the other, Wynton Marsalis’s quartet “At the Octoroon Balls,” in 1995. (And we’ll only get selections from the Marsalis.)
Not that programming should be a question of new-music quotas. There are some artists whose main gifts are for astonishing revivals, not premieres. And there is value in providing older but unfamiliar sounds to audiences. The Philharmonic, for example, has already this season presented a Haydn symphony and a Brahms serenade — neither a rarity, but both rarely played by that orchestra.
Chamber Music Society, by contrast, rarely ventures off the beaten path, and almost never into work of our time. (It’s true, you don’t often hear Beethoven’s Op. 104 quintet, his arrangement of one of his early trios, which comes in January.) This is particularly frustrating given that the chamber music field is exploding with new work and, relatively inexpensive to present, offers far easier opportunities for experimentation than orchestras or opera companies.
Some caveats are in order. The society’s performances are generally of unimpeachable quality. On Tuesday, Beethoven’s Trio in C minor (Op. 9, No. 3) received an airy reading from the violinist Arnaud Sussmann, the violist Matthew Lipman and the cellist Nicholas Canellakis. Hummel’s Piano Quintet in E flat (Op. 87), the least known work on the program, features a double bass instead of a second violin, a witty minuet and a brief, aching slow movement; Lipman, Canellakis, the pianist Wu Qian, the violinist Richard Lin and the bassist Blake Hinson played it stylishly.
Wu Qian and Wu Han — who is, with David Finckel, the society’s artistic director — were graceful in Schubert’s Rondo in A for piano, four hands (D. 951). And Wu Han, Lin, Sussmann (now on viola), Lipman, Canellakis and Hinson came together for a warm, lively performance of Mendelssohn’s Op. 110 Sextet in D, with its unusually heavy complement of low strings and its raucous climax.
The society has also given stalwart support over the years to rising musicians. It actively streamed while theaters were closed. It honorably paid artists 50 percent of their promised fees after pandemic cancellations, and will add 75 percent more when those dates are rescheduled.
And its performances at Tully are not the sum total of its offerings. Its concerts in the Rose Studio nearby seem to come from another universe, one far more contemporary and creative. The first “New Milestones” program of the season there, on Oct. 28, includes works — the oldest from 2008 — by Marcos Balter, Shih-Hui Chen, George Lewis, Alexandre Lunsqui and Nina Shekhar.
But there are just a handful of those performances, and the Rose Studio seats only about 100, versus nearly 1,100 in Tully. For the vast majority of the organization’s audience, the Tully season is the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center — and that audience is being handed a profoundly limited product.
It feels like kicking an institution when it’s down to criticize it so sharply as it reopens after such a devastating period. But a conservatism extreme even by classical music’s low standards was a problem with the society before the pandemic. That it seems to have viewed the past 19 months not as an opportunity to re-evaluate and reorient, but as a moment to double down, is unfortunate.
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
Presents a program of Puccini, Brahms, Webern and Shostakovich on Sunday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; chambermusicsociety.org.
Source: Music - nytimes.com
