"Sarasa ensemble freshens up Mozart "

by Michael Manning

Boston Globe, January 30, 2001

One of the hallmarks of a mature school of thought is the proliferation of its disciples and the melding of its distinctiveness with the mainstream. This is certainly true of so-called early performance practice, for which Boston is the North American center of activity. Community-based ensembles practicing in this style are nearly as common as those playing traditional chamber music, and the quality of these ensembles is, if anything, better. Saturday night, Cambridge1s Friends' Meeting House hosted one such group, Sarasa, in a program built around Mozart's chamber music with fortepiano. The performer at the center of this concert and of the group itself is the splendid British-American fortepianist Maggie Cole. In her hands, the delicacy of the fortepiano is no impediment to the power, even muscularity, of the music written for it. She combines a marvelous technique with superb musical instincts and good taste, and, with colleagues Brian Brooks, violin, Jennifer Stirling, viola, and Tim Merton, cello, managed to bring to even so well-worn a repertoire a welcome freshness.

The Sarasa ensemble performs with enormous vitality. Unafraid to play fast, these musicians don't sacrifice details or clarity to momentum, nor do they allow the density of detail - and there are few works denser than Beethoven's G major string trio - to dominate the flow of rhythm. While intonation was often a problem (Brooks was out of tune at the beginning of the Beethoven), especially in unison passages or where instruments moved in parallel intervals, other, more important virtues always won out.

In Mozart's Piano Trio in C Major, K. 548, Cole's articulation was fabulous and each in the ensemble exploited dynamics for heightened dramatic effect. The brilliant concluding Allegro was very fast but very clean.

The Beethoven was performed with great formal clarity, individual players meshing busy threads into a single, vivid fabric. Violist Stirling stood out in the ironic sense that the inner, more hidden voices of such works bear the lion's share of responsibility for shaping the overall inflection of the piece. Violists, like altos, have to be unobtrusive, subtly superb musicians. The tempo of the second movement was perfect - really more an andantino than an adagio.

Mozart's great Piano Quartet in G Minor, K. 478, was nicely performed, from the long breathless spinning of thematic materials in the first movement s development to the unaffected simplicity of the Andante, to the witty elegance of the Rondeau finale.