Chamber Music Northwest's young artists offer fresh performances ...

Chamber Music Northwest's Prot?g? Project has put a fresh face on chamber performance with up-and-coming players joining their more seasoned colleagues in non-traditional venues. Wednesday's concert at Someday Lounge in Old Town, Portland, offered gratifyingly fresh programming as well, with a set of new and obscure works united in intense expressiveness.??

The new works ? three of them, one a world premiere ? all came from one of the performers, the Moldova-born, Hillsboro-raised Katerina Kramarchuk, who began composing and playing piano as a child and is now headed to a masters degree at Juilliard. "Tides of Solitude," for bassoon, violin, cello and piano, was quick-witted, tightly constructed and ruefully introspective, with propulsive, sometimes jazzy rhythms and suave textures ? try to imagine Dmitri Shostakovich with a French accent.

The aptly-titled "Momentum" for viola and piano hurtled forward in jittery episodes framing a somber, quiet central section; violist Wei-Yang Andy Lin played it masterfully, with fleet fingers and gorgeous sonorities, and Kramarchuk herself matched his intensity at the keyboard.??

Lin then put away his viola and returned with an erhu, a Chinese fiddle with a captivating timbre reminiscent of a violin broadcast over an old radio, for an erhu-and-piano arrangement (with pianist Gloria Chien) of a Chinese traditional piece, "Parting of the Newly Married." This was a show-stopper ? his expressive and dynamic range on the diminutive two-string instrument was improbably wide, and his strong, sensitive bowing was a thrill to behold.??

Chien and Lin closed the evening with Lin's partners in the Amphion String Quartet, violinists David Southorn and Katie Hyun and cellist Mihai Marica, in Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Piano Quartet. A late-romantic gem too seldom played, the piece moves with youthful energy and rich chromaticism from a Viennese-flavored tuneful opening through a lovely set of variations and a muscular, driving finale; the players gave it a suitably voluptuous reading underscoring its nearly symphonic heft.

-- James McQuillen
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Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/performance/index.ssf/2012/07/chamber_music_northwests_young_1.html

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