Step Into the Chamber

Hundreds pass it every day, but only a handful have been inside, or even know what that small, elegant building between Widener and Lamont is called. Which is why Rodney Dennis, curator of manuscripts at the Houghton Library and amateur violist, decided to found a chamber music series.

"We thought it was time to break down some of the barriers and get more of the public into the library," Dennis said last week before the series' first concert. "We felt that chamber music would really warm the place up."

The four-part series features four different ensembles playing standard programs in the library's 'Green Room.' "We wanted to stay as close as possible to the central tradition of great 18th- and 19th-century music," Dennis said, noting that an almost prohibitively high ticket price--ten dollars per concert-- is offset in his mikd by "the high degree of competence among our very fine players."

Unfortunately to at least one listener this degree was not reflected in last Friday's concert. Harvey Seigal, violin, Michael Zaretsky, viola, and Martha Babcock, cello, played string trios by Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven as if they were sightreading and bored. The problem was not so much technique (although there were a few shaky moments) as ensemble. The group played stiffly, without moving or reaching to one another, and they barely even bowed to the audience.

But the series probably deserves another chance. The library's intimate hall has pleasant, warm acoustics, and its glass-enclosed displays of 15th-century manuscripts add to an already opulent atmosphere. The later concerts--featuring such Boston players as Mashuko Ushioda, Laurence Lessen and Luise Vosgerchian playing works of Brahms, Ravel, and others--show promise of being more interesting and more successful.

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It's too bad that neither Houghton Library nor the other two chamber music organizations that kicked off series last weekend made any effort to attract students to their audiences. Houghton's publicity consisted of subscription solicitations mailed to select members of the Harvard Community; the Peabody-Mason Music Foundation, which each year presents a series of free concerts in Paine Hall, postered apathetically in a few of the Houses; the only way one could have found out about the Apple Hill Chamber Player's Sunday night concert at the Longy school of Music (Garden Street between the Yard and the Quad) would have been to be on their mailing list.

The first Peabody-Mason concert (last Sunday afternoon) presented the Emerson string quartet--an award-winning group that in five years has become one of the world's leading string quartets--playing a program of Beethoven, Puccini, Stravinsky, and Debussy. Later concerts in this six-part series will feature performances by the New York Vocal Arts Ensemble, pianists Michael Borskin, Noel Lee, and Andrew Rangell, and the tenor Rolf Bjorling.

The Apple Hill Chamber Players are a group of young musicians who live and work together at their farm in Southern New Hampshire. There they offer a summer chamber music workshop frequented by Harvard students, among others. In their six-part series they will perform piano trios, quartets and quintets, as well as works for winds and winds and strings in combinations. Aothough they are at their best playing works of romantics like Brahms and Schumann, they also do well with classical and contemporary music.