Its movements sound vaguely Schubertian one moment, and both harmonically and structurally alien to Schubert the next. Harbison’s work, composed in 1988 and performed here by Lee, violinist Min-Young Kim, violist Laurie Kennedy and cellist Bonnie Thron, is otherwise a fantasy in which Schubert-like thematic fragments – as well as a theme from an unfinished Schubert rondo – are presented through a modern prism. Sechter assigned him a fugue subject based on the letters of Schubert’s name, but Schubert died before he could complete it, so Harbison closed his Schubert tribute by taking up the challenge, actually providing two extremely Bachian fugues instead of one. During the final weeks of his life, Schubert visited Simon Sechter, an older colleague, for lessons in fugue composition. If you are wondering where Bach fits into a Schubert program, the Harbison work offered an answer. More to the point, Lee’s gently turned keyboard work supported lovely, unpressured readings of the work’s top lines by flutist Susan Rotholz and violinist Philip Palermo, with Rotholz providing thoughtful ornamentation. True, a fortepiano is not quite the same as a modern concert grand, but Lee played it with a light, relaxed touch that approximated the sound of the transitional keyboard instrument, and the modern piano’s firm bass stood in for the cello that would typically have been included in a trio sonata performance. Though you might have been tempted to object that the keyboard line, played by Mihae Lee, the festival’s director, ought to have been heard on the harpsichord instead of the festival’s Petrov piano, the work’s history suggests otherwise: Frederick’s instrument collection included a fortepiano – a delicate-voiced predecessor of the modern piano – which Bach is known to have played for the king. There were some pleasingly subtle touches here. Bach’s “The Musical Offering,” a work composed shortly after Bach visited the court of Frederick the Great in Potsdam in 1747. The program opened, though, in a universe quite different from Schubert’s, with the Trio Sonata in C minor from J.S.
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