TB Times Critic Andrew Meacham sings the praises of the Palladium Chamber Players

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who through our March 1 Palladium Chamber Players concert was a stunning success.
 
I wanted to share a review of the concert by Tampa Bay Times Performing Arts Critic, Andrew Meacham, that appeared in Friday’s newspaper. Andrew clearly liked what he heard.
 
You can read the full review by following this link:
http://www.tampabay.com/things-to-do/stage/review-palladium-chamber-trio-mixes-contemporary-and-classical-with/2315130
 
By ANDREW MEACHAM, Times Performing Arts Critic, ST. PETERSBURG — If you think you know what chamber music is and you still don’t want to check it out, the Palladium Chamber Players have a message for you.
 
The musicians led by Florida Orchestra concertmaster Jeffrey Multer have enthusiastically, perhaps even aggressively, promoted their classical offerings for years. But because “chamber music” is kind of a dusty term connoting uncomfortable antique chairs and velvet curtains, some people who would attend a symphony never give it a chance. Wednesday’s concert at the Palladium was an example of why those patrons should reconsider.
 

 
The Palladium group is normally a string quartet. With violist Danielle Farina playing out of state, this concert showcased trio works by Joseph Haydn, Dmitri Shostakovich and Felix Mendelssohn. Another slight difference came in programming. Multer has described the job of chamber music, a form created for small ensembles, as a kind of conservatorship, not a forum for new or experimental music. That normally excludes 20th century music, Multer told the audience Wednesday, but this time would include Shostakovich’s Trio No. 2.
 
“This is a masterpiece and it needs to be played,” Multer said.
 
In the piece before intermission, the trio ushered in sounds one might associate with Shostakovich but few other composers: the bark of a piano; the lonely high wail of a cello; the scraping, stabbing sounds of a violin. Written in 1944 amidst massive Russian casualties, the cloud of Stalinist artistic purges and the unexpected death of Shostakovich’s closest friend, Trio No. 2 exhibits traits that would define the composer.
 
It opens with a deep darkness or mournfulness of the cello and violin, then diverges into an astringent, martial tone full of bouncing bows and plucked strings, possibly derived from an acid sarcasm. The cello and violin float high above the bass line of the piano which also exhausts itself, lapsing into smashed, dissonant chords. The effect as played by these musicians is both funereal and lovely, right up to the tapered off refusal of a finale, ending with a pointed silence.
 
The program opened with Haydn, perhaps the most influential voice in chamber music. The Palladium players rendered the Trio in C Major with an obvious affection for Haydn’s style for string quartets, in which a leading violin eventually hands off to the other instruments. The violin and cello sat downstage, close in proximity and in the score, the bows of Multer and Edward Arron dancing as their eyes darted off of each other and their instrument. Tones slide past each other like beams of light penetrating a closet.
 
Pianist Jeewon Park, meanwhile, is playing her tail off, anchoring those attacks and coy retreats, playing what seems like 10 or 12 notes a second for 15 minutes. The evening ended with Mendelssohn’s Trio No. 2, billed in Multer’s introduction as an “antidote” to the Shostakovich. It was not so much that as an energetic performance of music both joyous and calming, including the Doxology familiar to churchgoers. Mostly, it was a way for the trio to once again demonstrate that they play as a unit. Unlike symphonies, the ensemble structure means you can hear any wrong or inexact notes, of which there will always be some fragment. The end result of the Mendelssohn and the concert as a whole is that you not only hear the music, it grafts onto you like gossamer, a layer of musical skin you can wear out the door.
 
For tickets to our Palladium Chamber Players concerts in April and May, please call our box office at 727-822-3590 or follow this link for online tickets.