Ibis's Chamber Music Takes Wing in Arlington
- Article from The Washington Post, February 16, 1998
- Cecelia Porter
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The IBIS Chamber Music Society has launched a free concert series at Arlington's Lyon Park Community Center. If Saturday's zestful program gave an indication, the series promises to be a compelling one. Most of the players -- violinists Joseph Scheer and Joan Hurley, violist Shelley Coss, cellist Rachel Young, harpist Susan Robinson, flutist Adria Sternstein and clarinetist Gregory Raden -- are members of the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra and the National Symphony. They have initiated the project "to get out of the pit and play chamber music," Robinson said.
Except for Mozart's Clarinet Quintet, the program veered from the traditional. The harp (a modern 47-string double-action pedal instrument), an infrequent participant in the chamber music repertoire, was combined with string quartet in Debussy's "Danses Sacree et Profane." Robinson seemed to skim effortlessly over the shimmering glissandos, percussive effects and rippling arpeggios idiomatic to the instrument, as she did in Ravel's Introduction and Allegro, along with flute, clarinet and strings. Despite some rough string playing, Raden's clarinet filled the Mozart with all the liquid phrases, acrobatics between registers and wide-ranging colors that make the piece a winner. In her Theme and Variations, Op. 80, for flute and string quartet, composer Amy Beach somewhat overextends her central idea. But Sternstein, who hasn't yet succumbed to the gold-flute mystique, performed the piece with sheer iridescence, at times paired smoothly with Young's resonant cello sonorities.
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