The highlight of my musical weekend was the concert on Sunday, March 20^th of Quartet Accorda. This was a big event in the Park University calendar, as it represented the first time in nearly a year that these four terrific musicians—violinists Kanako Ito and Ben Sayevich, violist Chung-Hoon Peter Chunand cellist Martin Storey—have been able to unite to make music. Last summer Kanako and Martin, who are married, moved to Great Britain so that Martin could take up a plum job as principal cellist of the BBC Scottish Symphony. I find it amazing that an ensemble that hasn’t played together for 10 months can just sit down for two rehearsals and end up sounding like a fully professional string quartet. The program opened with Martinu’s Duo for Violin and Cello, in which husband and wife produced sounded so secure and substantial that it felt like a much larger ensemble was onstage.

Beethoven’s F-minor Quartet, Op. 95, was dark and serious, with powerful displays of the angular, extreme qualities we associate with the composer’s late style: In this ensemble’s hands the piece sounded more like “late Beethoven” than music from his middle period. The slow movement, in particular, showed an uncommon level of unity of affect and expression. (Despite the 10-month hiatus, the players of Accorda have been performing together for decades, and it shows.) For Dvorak’s Piano Quintet No. 2 they were joined by Park University and Youth Conservatory faculty member Marina Sultanova, who is International Center for Music director Stanislav Ioudenitch’s mother and a marvelous pianist in her own right. Rarely have I heard this piece—which can easily sound muddy and overpedaled—projected with such clarity of articulation and feeling. In the “Dumka” movement Marina was especially expressive, showing a sharp sophistication of line and form. The string players were ever supportive, playing with a transparency that allowed for ideal balance throughout.

* The Kansas City Symphony’s program over the weekend was an odd mixture of delights and disappointments. (I attended Friday.) The virtuosity of violist Roberto Diaz was on display in a performance of Penderecki’s Viola Concerto, an introverted piece with dark shadows and plenty of busy solo work. The orchestra under Michael Stern sounded less than fully secure in this tough piece, but fared better in the straightforward and light-weight “Wasps” Suite of Vaughan Williams—which the Symphony will include on its upcoming CD of English music. The program opened with a new piece by Osvaldo Golijov, Sidereus, a vaguely minimalist score with sweet themes and a gently undulating quality suggesting the work’s celestial inspiration. (It was meant to evoke, partly, the feelings Galileo might have felt when he first saw the moon through a telescope.) Most successful was the final piece, the Four Dances from Estancia of Ginastera, a vigorous and raucous romp through a number of extroverted and playfully irregular dance movements—including the irresistible, high-decibel finale.

* Earlier on Friday (March 18^th), I attended the first installment of the Westport Center for the Arts’ presentation of the entire 48 preludes and fugues from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Rebecca Bell and Marian Thomas were the performers in this first set of eight preludes and fugues from Book 2, which they discussed rather extensively between pieces. The special treat of the day was the harpsichord itself, a Hubbard kit that Marian built herself after having worked at the Hubbard factory for a year. It is unusually clear and resonant, far more so than most “kits” I have heard over the years.

But what was most intriguing was the effect that the Baroque tuning, known as “Werckmeister 3,” had on the various keys in question. C-major sounded quite plain, while the E-flats of C minor had a vaguely tart sound. The key of C-sharp major is perhaps the most remote in this tuning, but instead of sounding out of tune it just was colorful and interesting; C-sharp minor was sweetly plangent in a way that it never is in “equal temperament.” E-flat major and E major sounded oddly strange to me, and piqued my curiosity to hear future installments of this path-forging project.