The soloists who participated in this concert “Celebrating 30 Years of Excellence in Classical Music” were fine ambassadors of Musica de Camara’s mission to present “Puerto Rican and Hispanic classical musicians in concert.” And the Musica de Camara String Ensemble, made up of Hispanic and non-Hispanic players, presented a beautiful picture of the diversity of this great city of ours.
After a special introductory proclamation from the City Council of New York, presented by its Speaker of the House, Christine Quinn, we heard a reduced group of the ensemble perform J.S. Bach’s Double Violin Concerto in D minor, BWV 1043. My worries about how this piece would fare in the over-reverberant acoustics of the cathedral were unfounded. The polyphonic textures were clear, and the expert soloists, Jose Miguel Cueto and Evelyn Estava, were well balanced. They handled the work’s technical demands with ease and performed the slow movement with lilting grace. I did miss the use of a harpsichord continuo to fill in the chords during the solo passages accompanied by just cello and bass. And we needed more celli and basses during the tutti sections.
The rest of the players then joined their colleagues for a luscious performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasy on a Theme of Thomas Tallis”. Here, the ensemble’s beautiful, rich sound was further enhanced by the cathedral’s live acoustics. This is a perfect piece for this space, but a very important spatial aspect of the work was disregarded. It is scored for a string quartet and two different sized string orchestras. If, as in tonight’s performance, these orchestras aren’t physically separated from each other, the composer’s antiphonal effects are weakened or lost. Although we heard a fine performance, skillfully paced and shaped by conductor Christian Colberg, it was one which didn’t express a crucial part of the composer’s intent.
A performance of Dvorak’s Serenade for Strings in E major, Opus 22 exhibited the same fine intonation and tight ensemble we heard all evening. But here the echoey acoustics got in the way and created muddy textures. The concert ended with a spirited performance of Jose Ignacio Quinton’s Puerto Rican dance, “El Coqui.”
