Chamber music starts Sommerfest

It is perhaps a sign of our downsized times that the first event of this year's Minnesota Orchestra Sommerfest, on Friday morning at Orchestra Hall, was a concert of chamber music in which just 11 musicians took the stage.

For some, this may have been too soft a rollout for what is, after all, an orchestral festival. But I found no cause for complaint. The program -- anchored in Germany, with a jaunt across the English Channel -- was unhackneyed, the performances gratifying. And for an hour or two, the band's customary carbon footprint was much reduced. (Partisans of the big bang needn't fret; that repertory returns soon.)

Opening Friday's concert were six of Max Bruch's Eight Pieces for Clarinet, Viola and Piano. Written a century ago, on the eve of Bruch's retirement as a composition professor in Berlin, these are character pieces, all but one in minor keys, self-consciously "late."

Looking back on the waning middle-class musical culture of 19th-century Middle Europe, they breathe the same air as Brahms' valedictory chamber works for clarinet. (Only five years younger than Brahms, Bruch outlived him by more than two decades -- long enough to feel like a relic.)

Susan Billmeyer, Thomas Turner and Osmo Vänskä (in one of his welcome appearances as clarinetist) captured the music's twilit glow. The dark Nocturne (No. 6) was especially affecting.

Born into an aristocratic English family, Lennox Berkeley (1903-89) studied with Nadia Boulanger and came under the sway of Stravinsky and Ravel. His 1967 Quartet for Oboe and String Trio explores a vein of understated French-accented lyricism. It was handsomely played by Basil Reeve, the orchestra's sweet-toned principal oboe, and three string-playing colleagues: Gina DiBello, Aaron Janse and Anthony Ross.

Robert Schumann's E-flat Piano Quartet has lived in the shadow of his more romantic, more extroverted Piano Quintet in the same key, completed a bit earlier. Accounts as committed as Friday's (by Jonathan Magness, Kenneth Freed, Arek Tesarczyk and Claudia Chen) should help restore the work to its rightful place in the Schumann canon.

The late Peter Ostwald, in an engrossing psychobiography, suggested that Schumann suffered from a version of seasonal affective disorder. In the poignant Andante of this quartet (written in October and November 1842), Ostwald heard the approach of winter -- a sadness disconcertingly reinforced by Friday's autumnal nip. Is this to be a Sommerfest without sommer?

Larry Fuchsberg writes frequently about music.