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Exquisite Playing for Eccentric Music New York
Church of the Good Shepherd
09/08/2025 -
Charles Martin Loeffler: L’Etang
Gioachino Rossini: Soirée musicales: 10. “La pesca”
Carl Reinecke: Flute Sonata in E Major “Undine, Opus 167
Franz Schubert: Piano Quintet in A Major “The Trout”, Opus 114, D. 667
Jupiter Chamber Players: Sooyun Kim (Flute), Roni Gal‑Ed (Oboe), Vadim Lando (Clarinet), Nijoma Grevious (Violin), Paul Larama (Viola), Mihai Marica (Cello), Gabriel Polinsky (Double Bass), Drew Petersen (Piano)
S. Kim, D. Petersen (© Courtesy of the Artists)
“The significance of chamber music is that, in dealing with the intimate it can attain to the ineffable.”
Hans Werner Henze
“The soft complaining flute/In dying notes discovers/The woes of hopeless lovers/Whose woes are whisper’d by the warbling lute.”
John Dryden, A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day
No matter what the program, the twice-monthly Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players have a single sacred virtue. Their music is performed by professional artists of the highest standards. Except to those in the business, these are not stellar names like Yo‑Yo or Wang. But they are of the very highest standards.
Nor are their choices always Mozart or Beethoven. Yesterday brought forth the one‑time German-American violin virtuoso-composer Charles Loeffler. The one‑time renowned German teacher Carl Reinecke (his students included Grieg, Furtwängler and everybody else) is forgotten now except for solo virtuosi. Rossini and Schubert are of course celebrated, but this Rossini was a rare arrangement from delicious aria for two females.
All four composers were given what could only be called exciting performances. Their own polished professionalism, added to their joy, simply the apogee of chamber music.
Add to this a most unusual nature linkage of the quartet. We had one pond, one mermaid-human, and two fish. Even that curmudgeonly professional-writer amateur-flutist Henry Thoreau would have approved!
Of course Walden had his own placid pond. The Pond depicted by Mr. Loeffler, based on a French poem, was supposed to be haunted, gloomy. But the oboist and violist showed us a rather jaunty pond. At times, we heard a Delius-style Florida melody, at other times...was that a frog splashing? Were these strange major-minor rolls from oboist Roni Gal‑Ed? Whatever they were, Loeffler did graduate from ordinary 1900’s American “serious” to eccentric whimsicality.
I had assumed that Rossini’s “Fish” would come from the later orchestrated Musical Nights. Well, the flute-clarinet-piano combination was indeed arranged from the original soprano-mezzo work. And that song (as I later learned from YouTube) was one of the extraordinary duets from the agéd post‑opera composer.
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Even better, it introduced us to Sooyun Kim’s flute. I have heard (and interviewed) Rampal and Galway. But Ms. Kim’s luscious tone, her firm articulation and the quavers from top to bottom in the Reinecke Sonata became yes, a picture of Undine swirling, a boat rocking, all four movements a floating image, turning from passion to romance to a kind of mermaid-human kiss.
I could have heard Ms. Kim for an entire recital, but the Jupiter turned to strings and piano for Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet. The strings had all the velocity needed in this ravishing work. Yet it was obvious they were commanded by Drew Petersen. Besides his fantastic virtuosity, he bounced every note, his accents were striking, his trills and double‑trills had extraordinary clarity.
One could visualize a Schubert expert telling him to give a little bit of air, allow some of the inner Schubert to show. But the full‑blooded glittering Schubert was worthy of total adulation.
Harry Rolnick
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