Great Lakes Chamber Music Fest

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Twenty-eight years later, last June, Tocco and I were not quite the youngest people in the Kerrytown Concert House. The sold-out audience was still full of hair grayer than mine, but most of the performers in the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival's three concerts were genuine youngsters.

True, Tocco contributed a masterly reading, with cellist Andres Diaz, of Debussy's Cello Sonata, and cellist Paul Katz offered a commanding interpretation of Prokofiev's Cello Sonata, with pianist Pei-Shan Lee. And let's not overlook Anton Nel's incandescent performance of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.

But good as these mature masters were, the real stars of the series of diverse programs and performers were the ensembles of young players--young with all the best attributes of youth: energy, passion, enthusiasm, and killer technique, both collectively and individually. If the music making I heard is representative of the youth of today, classical music's future is assured.

The Attacca Quartet's take on Mendelssohn's E minor String Quartet was incredibly ardent and astoundingly accurate, even in the German Romantic's trademark supersonic above-the-staff string writing. The Trio Terzetto's performance of Leon Kirchner's Piano Trio was just as precise, and so blazingly passionate that it made a persuasive case for the work's second-hand expressionism. And the Sima Trio's reading of Mozart's G minor Piano Quartet, with illustrious violist Kim Kashkashian, was wonderfully sonorous and surpassingly lyrical, even in the dramatic opening Allegro.