Five of LA’s Finest Play Brahms, et al, at Mason House

l-r: Ambroise Aubrun, Martin Chalifour, Todd Mason, Cécilia Tsan, David Kaplan, Jonah Sirota,
Dr. Kristi Brown.

REVIEW

Chalifour and Friends play Mason, Kreisler, Debussy, and Brahms at Mason House

DAVID J BROWN

I’m not usually a fan of playing isolated movements from integrated works like a sonata or a symphony, where the contrasts between the often widely differing movements add up to an expressive whole greater than the sum of its parts. But if anyone has the right to sanction such a selection then it’s the composer of the piece in question, and this was the case with host Todd Mason at the February concert in this year’s season (the 12th) at his Mar Vista home, when he chose to open the program with just the Andante tranquillo first movement of his own String Quartet No. 1 (2019).

The aim was to induce, at least for this evening, a sense of calm to counter the external turmoil and discord we’re all living with, and the performance by some of LA’s finest string players (Martin Chalifour and Ambroise Aubrun, violins; Jonah Sirota, viola; and Cécilia Tsan, cello) was as nuanced and responsive to the music’s ebb and flow as anyone could wish—though, a little ironically perhaps, the very acoustic clarity of Mason’s purpose-remodeled concert room revealed more clearly than would a larger space the music’s inner harmonic tensions as the instrumental lines wove together.

Fritz Kreisler.

Mason House regular Dr. Kristi Brown in her pre-concert talk made the most of the juicy back-story to the next two items on the program. After showing an early review of a concert by violinist Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962) including pieces by some 18th century composers, she segued to another later clipping in which he confessed (shock! horror!) that in fact they’d been pastiches by himself. Following the Mason quartet movement, the capacity audience was privileged to hear a couple of these from the virtuoso hands of Martin Chalifour, joined by pianist David Kaplan.

Both Tempo di Minuetto and Prélude et Allegro were originally attributed to Gaetano Pugnani (1731-1798), the former amiably stately in its outer sections, enclosing a jaunty little trio, but overall not particularly remarkable. The Prélude et Allegro was altogether more impressive, however, with its wide-leaping first half giving way to a really scorching account by Chalifour of the whirlwind, cadenza-like Allegro.

Claude Debussy, c.1910.

By late 1914 Claude Debussy was already seriously ill and, as a patriotic Frenchman and particularly a Parisian, was angered and depressed by, and personally feeling the effects of, the war with Germany. His impulse to compose had diminished severely, but was reawakened when his publisher encouraged him to embark on a set of sonatas, each for a different combination of instruments. The first half’s final item was thus the first of these, Debussy’s Cello Sonata L.144, with Tsan replacing Chalifour up front, and Kaplan remaining at the piano.

In some hands these late chamber works of Debussy can feel a bit like disjointed fragments from a sensibility so refined it can barely be articulated, but this performance was anything but reticent. As played by Kaplan—and joined by Tsan from the fourth measure—the first movement’s slow start, tellingly marked Sostenuto e molto risoluto, felt like a portentous opening onto the new expressive world where this sonata and the two following would unfold, as well as the never-to-be-realized plan for the three more that Debussy’s death in 1918 at only 55 would cancel.

The Cello Sonata’s three movements cover a remarkable range of dynamic, pace, timbre, and style of instrumental attack across their total duration of under 12 minutes, and Kaplan and Tsan, faithfully following as many of Debussy’s myriad expressive markings as seemed humanly possible, delivered a performance of visceral impact and intensity.

Brahms in 1866. 

The single big piece after the interval was arguably the one amongst Brahms’s chamber works that went through the most reworking before it reached its final form, and—pretty inarguably—is the most dramatic of them all. Privy to its evolution, Clara Schumann is said to have suggested that the work which eventually reached its final form in 1864 as the Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34 could equally be for orchestra (indeed the English composer Robin Holloway has very successfully orchestrated it as “Symphony in F minor”), and Chalifour and friends duly treated the Mason House audience to a performance which combined visceral impact in the great unison passages and sensitive interplay, as at the violinists’ duetting in the opening movement’s second subject group.

With the overall duration at a very trim 38 minutes or so (not entirely due to the omission of the first movement exposition repeat, which gave that movement even more of an arrow-like momentum than usual), the arrival of Brahms’ astonishing concluding cadence to the finale, like a lead-weighted drop-curtain plunging down, had the proper effect of a stunned silence before the applause erupted. Yet another memorable evening at Mason House, enhanced as ever by Ethel Phipps' wonderful catering, and three concerts still to come in this season—may there be many more!

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Mason Home Concert, 3484 Redwood Ave., Mar Vista, CA 90066, 6:00 p.m., Saturday, February 21, 2026.

Images: The performance: Todd Mason; Kreisler, Debussy, Brahms: Wikimedia Commons.

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Schubert Sings Schubert (and Others) at Mason House

REVIEW

Anna Schubert, soprano & Milena Gligić, piano, Mason Home Concerts, Mar Vista

RODNEY PUNT

A snug living-room full of music lovers was treated to a terrific song recital on the fourth Saturday in January, delivered by soprano Anna Schubert and collaborative pianist Milena Gligiċ. As LA Opus readers will know well, the venue was the private house in LA’s Mar Vista neighborhood where owner/impresario/composer Todd Mason has presented his home concerts for the last 12 years. While instrumental music has predominated, vocal music is increasingly popular.

Anna Schubert.

Anna Schubert is well known to this writer from her performances at the Long Beach Opera (reviews here and here), where her tall presence (almost six feet in heels) projected authority in two strong Handelian character roles. Nonetheless, the two most important art-music forms for the human voice couldn’t be more different in form and function.

While opera is grand, with big emotions, and often bigger performers who go at each other fiercely, art song is small in scale, its universe of emotions delivered by a single singer. Opera productions are easy to follow, with evocative sets, and plenty of physical action between the singer-actors. Nowadays printed lyrics are either festooned above the proscenium or on the backs of seats facing the viewer, vastly improving comprehension of the opera’s action.

Debussy by Marcel Baschet, 1884.

Song recitals are an entirely different experience because each song is its own encapsulated story-world in miniature. The challenge for the singer is to articulate lyrics clearly while conveying varied emotions in each story. Given the lack of physical action, the singer must convey a song’s emotional meaning by face and voice only. Further complicating matters, most art songs in the repertory are sung in languages other than English.

This evening’s 14 songs were divided, eight and six, between French and German settings. The French first half opened with three of the Ariettes oubliées L. 60, a song-cycle written between 1886 and 1887 by Claude Debussy (1862-1918). Schubert and Gligić gave us Nos. 3, L'ombre des arbres, 5 Green, and 6 Spleen (both the latter designated as Aquarelles), all three of which shared a mood of romantic nostalgia and resignation, eloquently projected by Anna Schubert.

Henri Duparc, 1880.

The Gallic ennui continued with Elégie (1874), Extase (1874), and L'invitation au voyage (1870) by Debussy’s older countryman Henri Duparc (1848-1933), and was thoroughly maintained with the final pair from Debussy, Beau Soir L. 84 (1890-91) and Apparition L. 57 (1884). If I have a criticism it’s that there was no break in this first set, which made for a long string of songs that might have been better grouped in two sets of the two composers. The audience did not know when or if they should clap, so they didn’t.

After the break, as ever enriched by refreshments including a hot dish from the skilled hands of Ethel Phipps, we had, first, Schubert singing Schubert, with Anna charmingly acknowledging that she just might have a distant family connection to the great Austrian master. The selections were Suleika I, D. 720 (1821), Du bist die Ruh, Op. 59, No. 3, D. 776 (1823), Nacht und Träume, Op. 43, No. 2, D. 827 (1823), and finally the early but astonishingly original Gretchen am Spinnrade, Op. 2, D. 118 (1814), its passion transfixing in Anna’s performance.

Schubert as imaged by
Gustav Klimt, 1890.

Two widely differing items completed the program. The first was Ich scheide, S. 319 (1860), by Franz Liszt (1811-1886), the haunting tenderness of which might have come as a big surprise to anyone used only to the barnstorming virtuosity of much of his solo piano music.

Then, to close an evening that had progressed in an approximately reverse chronological order, came the ineffably beautiful soprano aria Bete aber auch dabei, the fourth number in J. S. Bach’s church cantata No. 115, Mache dich, mein Geist, bereit, BWV 115 (1724).

Milena Gligić.

Needless to say, this shortish but memorable recital had a rapturous reception from Mason House’s capacity audience, its success owing much to Anna Schubert’s collaboration with Milena Gligić, a last-minute substitute for another indisposed pianist, and a singer herself.

She played Mason’s 1986 Yamaha C7 with German hammers, which really help to give the instrument the softer tone so welcome in chamber music, as well as when accompanying a voice, as here. In addition, the acoustic design of this small concert room magnifies the low end so it sounds a lot better than if it were in a typical home or even a big stage.

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Mason Home Concerts, 3484 Redwood Ave., Mar Vista, CA 90066, Saturday, January 24, 6:00 p.m.

Images: The performance: Todd Mason; Debussy, Duparc, Schubert: Wikimedia Commons.

Strauss's Don Quixote and Tchaikovsky at Long Beach

Cécilia Tsan (cello), Music Director Eckart Preu, and the Long Beach Symphony acknowledge the heartfelt reception for their performance of Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote.

REVIEW

Long Beach Symphony, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach

DAVID J BROWN

The first half of the January concert in the Long Beach Symphony’s 2025-2026 season was devoted to Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35 (1878), played by the American violinist Tai Murray with the LBSO as ever under the baton of its Music Director Eckart Preu. As is well known, Tchaikovsky wrote it, on the rebound from his brief and disastrous marriage, while staying in Switzerland with his composition pupil, the violinist Iosif Kotek. Composition was rapid, and in close collaboration with Kotek, who was also probably his lover.

Tchaikovsky with Iosef Kotek (left).

The performance was sumptuously romantic from the outset, with exquisite intonation from Ms. Murray and the customary attentive skill with which Maestro Preu managed the orchestra’s interaction with her. However, to these ears their expansive account of the long first movement to some extent lacked urgency and the emotional tension that’s surely behind the work’s genesis and is indeed never far beneath the surface of Tchaikovsky’s music, and thus made the movement seem more like a meditative rhapsody than a dynamically evolving structure.

Nonetheless the audience was on its collective feet and cheering even after that first movement, and following an inarguably inward and tender account of the Canzonetta, with some deliciously pointed woodwind contributions, Tchaikovsky’s attacca subito before the Finale fortunately neutered the impulse to any more inter-movement applause. This Finale certainly lived up to its initial Allegro vivacissimo marking, and Preu’s control through what seemed more extreme tempo contrasts than usual in this movement held it together securely.

Tai Murray speaking at the
 post-concert reception.

The rapturous reaction from the near-capacity audience was redoubled at the concerto’s whiplash conclusion, and Ms Murray rewarded them with, as encore, a poised and haunting performance of the Largo third movement from J. S. Bach’s Sonata No. 3 in C major, BWV 1005, for solo violin.

Near the end of his long life Richard Strauss (1864-1949) is said to have remarked "I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer." We cannot know how much genuine self-deprecation or irony there was in that statement, but if there is one at least amongst his orchestral works that justifies him being elevated to the top level of the pantheon it is Don Quixote: Phantastische Variationen über ein Thema ritterlichen Charakters, Op. 34 (1897), with the clever double meaning buried within that subtitle.

Richard Strauss around the time of
Don Quixote's composition.

The work is indeed an extraordinarily virtuosic set of variations on a musical theme “of knightly character,” but equally “theme” in this context can be taken to mean the personality of its titular hero, with those “variations” being aspects of both his character and his actions. Strauss’s balancing of this double meaning, with genius-level musical craft bringing to life a profoundly human subject, is the central factor that elevates this seventh of Strauss's 10 tone-poems to true greatness.

The 10 numbered and titled variations that form the main body of Don Quixote have two preceding sections, the first of them an extensive Introduction, so complex and varied in mood, texture and dynamic that it could stand as a miniature symphonic poem all by itself. Not only does the Introduction adumbrate the very distinctive themes that represent the Don and his squire Sancho Panza— who are “officially” introduced in the second of those preceding sections by the solo cello and viola that represent them—but it also foreshadows the dramatic events that unfold in the variations themselves.

To include Don Quixote in an LBSO concert had been an ambition cherished alike by Maestro Preu, Principal Cello Cécilia Tsan, and President Kelly Ruggirello for several years but, caught first between the Scylla of Covid and then the Charybdis of budgetary restrictions, only in this season was it at last possible to mount the work, given Strauss’s very large orchestral specification. And it was clear from the outset that this promised to be an exceptional account of the piece.

Andrew Duckles and Eckart Preu.

In an illuminating pre-concert chat with Maestro Preu, LBSO Principal Viola Andrew Duckles (the evening’s Sancho Panza) opined that Don Quixote is really the first “concerto for orchestra,” given how Strauss exploits each instrument and tests every player to the utmost, and already in the Introduction alone Preu’s spacious and skillful direction, and the LBSO’s devoted following of him, demonstrated the truth of this in translucent detail, as individual players and sections, from solo flute down to the tubas (one tenor, one bass)—notably via an important thematic statement from the viola section alone—each had their moment in the spotlight.

And then, after this resplendent and tumultuous preparation, we met the Don himself in the person of Ms. Tsan, celebrating 25 years as the LBSO’s Principal Cello. In yet another demonstration of Strauss’s mastery, he carefully conceives the cello part as a “first amongst equals” rather than with concerto solo prominence, and Ms. Tsan’s assumption of the role was a consummate embodiment of this. Her opening solo certainly projected the bold challenge of the Don’s first appearance—where Strauss’s theme embraces imperiousness, grace, and underlying disturbance—but immediately there was the first of many generous collaborations with other players, this being the duet with solo violin (Concertmaster Roger Wilkie) that elaborates contrapuntally on the theme.

Sancho Panza first arrives (Maggiore in the score) in a huffing, rumbling duet between tenor tuba and bass clarinet (Arisa Makita and Michael Yoshimi respectively) but the viola soon takes center stage in the story’s second important characterization. Mr Duckles conveyed all of the part’s various confidences and hesitancies, cheerfulness and questionings—and in this opening relished another of Strauss’s “concerto for orchestra” inspirations, duetting with the piccolo (Diane Alancraig).

In brief comments before the start Maestro Preu confessed that his favorites amongst the 10 variations were #II, where Quixote mistakes a herd of sheep for an emperor’s army and engages them, and #VII, the “ride through the air.”

The former is probably the most extreme example of scoring innovation in the entire work, and the LBSO brass duly bleated pianissimo against witterings from multi-divided violas ppp, and then along with all the winds fortissimo as they were attacked. Strauss’s sense of proportion in this work is unfailing, however. Each of these most virtuoso of the variations—in #VII grand brass cadences are borne aloft by swirling woodwind and strings and energetically cranked wind machine—lasts barely a minute. Nothing outstays its welcome.

Indeed, all the variations proceed one to the next without pause, so that any successful performance must neither minimize nor stumble over the many abrupt changes of instrumental texture, speed, dynamic, meter, and key, where Strauss’s musical narrative turns on a dime from humor to grandeur, from heroic tragedy to bucolic musing. Preu’s masterly handling of the score and the LBSO’s response managed to combine all the sudden vividness of contrast needed with overall conviction and coherence.

Cécilia Tsan at the post-concert reception.

Ms. Tsan carried the Finale, where Quixote at lasts returns to sanity, with playing of radiant tenderness than never threatened to slip into exaggeration or sentimentality, and Preu and the orchestra maintained their eloquent support.

The Finale’s moments of renewed agitation and, latterly, near-exact repetition of the orchestra’s first statements of the principal themes in the Introduction, show Strauss’s mastery in perfectly closing the work’s expressive circle, and the performers’ unerring nailing of these aspects as well as the rich eloquence that pervades the movement and the gentle quietude of its end set the seal on one of the finest accounts of this masterpiece that I have ever heard.

Two concerts remain in the LBSO’s 2025-2026 Classical season. On February 28 Pepe Romero returns to play Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez in a program that opens with Gabriela Lena Frank’s Elegia Andina for Orchestra and concludes with the first two of Handel’s Water Music suites. Then to close the season, on June 6 the orchestra musters even larger forces than the Strauss for Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, with Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik as the amuse-bouche. 

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Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach, Saturday, January 31, 2026, 7.30 p.m.

Images: The performance: Todd Mason and David de Santiago; Tchaikovsky and Kotek: tchaikovsky-research.net; Richard Strauss: Wikimedia Commons.

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