Concert review: an evening at Seattle Chamber Music Society’s 2025 Summer Festival

With the other major classical institutions largely on summer hiatus, the Seattle Chamber Music Society takes centre stage in July, commanding the city’s musical life with a month-long festival that has been packing Benaroya Hall’s chamber music venue. Its varied slate of mainstage concerts, related events and guest artists has become a cultural fixture. Indeed, SCMS is expanding its presence with the recent announcement of an extended year-round season of offerings.

The programme on 15 July marked the near-midpoint of this summer’s 12-concert cycle and brought together three vivid perspectives on the piano–string ensemble dynamic. Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A major, K. 414, was presented in the version the composer authorised for piano and string quartet (‘a quattro’). Though he pioneered the string quintet and wrote a superb quintet for piano and winds (K. 452), Mozart’s arrangement of K. 414 for domestic performances makes it something of a piano quintet avant la lettre.

Steven Osborne brought taste and poise to the soloist role, with the quartet – violinists Amy Schwartz Moretti and Erin Keefe, violist Matthew Lipman and cellist Raphael Bell – providing tactful commentary and measured interaction, at a far remove from the dramatic exchange of a Romantic concerto. In its original concerto format, K. 414 – a product of Mozart’s first year in Vienna – is already a comparatively intimate, restrained work,  and this reading made a virtue of its conversational charm. Particularly affecting was the Andante, in which Mozart pays tribute to the recently deceased J.C. Bach, a formative influence, with a direct quotation. The finale sparkled with joie de vivre.

Late-Romantic grandeur followed with Amy Beach’s Piano Quintet in F-sharp minor, Op. 67, a work from 1907–08 that hews to the language of Brahms rather than newfangled Modernism, albeit with a noticeably American accent – evident in a certain restlessness of phrasing and texture and in its unreserved expressive attitude. If the Mozart was a concerto scaled down, Beach’s quintet often feels like symphonic music distilled into chamber form. Orion Weiss anchored the ensemble with assertiveness and sweep, joined by violinists Stephen Rose and Andrew Wan, violist Che-Yen Chen and cellist Edward Arron. Chen’s notably lush viola sound came to the fore in the stirring Adagio.

One of the distinctive aspects of SCMS’s programming is its rotational casting: each work on a given concert typically features a different ensemble, allowing musicians to focus on a single piece and listeners to encounter a range of artistic personalities. Thus we had three pianists in succession, each matched with a new lineup of string players. Following Osborne’s refined Mozart and Weiss’s Romantic sweep, the concert culminated in a radiant performance of Schumann’s E-flat major Piano Quartet featuring Yulianna Avdeeva alongside artistic director James Ehnes on violin, Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt (former Dover Quartet violist) and Seattle Symphony’s principal cellist Efe Baltacıgil.

Avdeeva, fresh from her solo prelude recital pairing selections from Shostakovich’s cycle of preludes and fugues with a trio of Chopin preludes, combined poetic nuance with deep musical intelligence, remaining fully integrated with her partners’ voices throughout. 

Familiar as Schumann’s score is, it felt newly considered in an interpretation that equally emphasised contrast and cohesion. Baltacıgil’s prominent presence was tender and pliant but never sentimental. As Ehnes and Pajaro-van de Stadt delicately unfolded their curlicues of decorated melody in the slow movement’s reprise, Baltacıgil’s brief pause to retune his lowest string for the final moments added a note of hushed intensity, as if the music itself were holding its breath. Schumann’s exuberant counterpoint in the finale radiated the sheer joy of their ensemble playing.

Seattle Chamber Music Society’s 2025 Summer Festival continues through 1 August and can be experienced virtually via on-demand streaming. 

THOMAS MAY

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