A Scintillating Mason House Season Finale

Tosca Opdam and Asi Matathias, violins, with Alin Melik-Adamyan (hidden) at the keyboard,
play Moritz Moszkowski’s Suite for Two Violins and Piano at Mason House.

REVIEW

Tosca Opdam and Friends play Moszkowski and Dvořák at Mason House

DAVID J BROWN

Two of the 19th century’s most luxuriantly-mustachioed compositional neglectees came out of the shadows during this year’s Mason House concerts. Back in April we had Ludwig Thuille’s Sextet for Piano and Woodwind Quintet, Op. 6 (reviewed here by John Stodder), and in the final concert of this 12th season of what is surely LA’s most intimate, impactful and welcoming chamber music series there was the Suite for Two Violins and Piano, Op. 71, by Moritz Moszkowski (1854-1925).

Moritz Moskowski.

Moszkowski’s Wikipedia page describes him as “a German-Polish composer, pianist, and teacher,” but his principal fame in life seems to have been as a performer and—as Dr. Kristi Brown-Montesano noted in her, as ever, witty and informative pre-concert talk—when illness necessitated his withdrawal from the concert platform, his star went into a permanent and ultimately tragic decline. Once rich and famous, he became mostly forgotten and destitute, the proceeds of a testimonial concert organized by friends and admirers failing to reach him before his death from stomach cancer.

However, Moszkowski was a composer of real substance. Some of his prolific output of solo piano pieces have kept his name modestly present in recital programs, but it’s only in recent years—mainly via the British record companies Toccata Classics and Hyperion—that his orchestral works have surfaced, mostly hugely enjoyable… and some also, frankly, really huge. Between these extremes, though, Moszkowski seems to have had little time for multi-movement chamber works which, if this performance of the Suite—a relatively late piece dating from 1903—was anything to go by, is a pity.

In the hands of the virtuoso spousal violinists Tosca Opdam (right, who has recorded host Todd Mason’s Violin Concerto) and Asi Matathias, visiting from their home in Amsterdam, and LA-based pianist Alin Melik-Adamyan, the Suite’s opening Allegro energico erupted from the starting-gate in a galvanizing display of unanimity and passion that continued to surge through the entire concise movement, dominated as it is by its exuberantly tumbling, many-time-repeated main theme.

The Suite has none of the prolixity that makes some of Moszkowski’s early orchestral works threaten to outstay their welcome. The second movement was a sweetly beguiling Allegro moderato replacing what would be the scherzo if the work aspired to sonata status, followed by a brief, romantic Lento assai. Then, to usher in the finale, a boogie-woogie piano intro led to a whirl of duetting and motifs being tossed back and forth between the violins before a presto coda for all three instruments brought this delicious discovery to an audience-cheering end.

After the interval—as always, not as brief as the host Todd Mason requested due to the conviviality fueled by resident caterer Ethel Phipps’ delicious food—it was back for the second half, again a single work, and this time Antonín Dvořák’s Piano Quintet No. 2 in A major, Op. 81, in which Opdam, Matathias, and Melik-Adamyan were joined by two luminaries from LA’s illustrious musical community—both familiar from previous Mason House recitals—Carson Rick (viola), and Cécilia Tsan (cello).

Dvořák was as prodigious in his output of chamber music as Moszkowski was parsimonious, and amongst this richly varied landscape of works the Second Piano Quintet, written in 1887 between the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, stands as a peak in its memorability, breadth and variety of expression, second only perhaps to the magisterial Piano Trio No. 3 in F minor.

Antonin Dvořák, 1882.

By now it was only reasonable to anticipate that this would be an exceptional performance, but even so the sheer coherence and unanimity of this group of five performers, who sounded as if they had been playing together for years rather than having come together for the first time for this evening, was quite remarkable.

If there was a regret, it was that they omitted to make the marked first movement exposition repeat, if only because it deprived us of hearing for a second time the fathoms-deep richness of Ms. Tsan’s cello as, over a gently rocking piano accompaniment, the solo instrument lays out Dvořák’s spacious and deeply felt opening theme—the immediate juxtaposition of which with vigorous action from all five instruments immediately making clear the range of expressive territory that the work will explore.

“Tosca Opdam and friends” indeed proved masters of every mood and motion within this masterpiece. Their playing of the second, Dumka, movement—an extraordinarily original structure that is so much more than just a “slow movement”—encompassed every facet of its elaboration and many changes of pace. Dvořák’s masterly sense of proportion doesn’t fail him, with the latter two movements notably concise after the complexity of their predecessors. The Scherzo (Furiant) was as fleet and airborne has anyone could wish, and the group had ample energy left for the vigorous Allegro finale.

l-r: Todd Mason, Alin Melik-Adamyan, Tosca Opdam, Asi Matathias, Cécilia Tsan, Carson Rick.

This rivetingly engaged performance of the great work was hailed by everyone in Mason’s packed concert room, and it was good to be reminded that Tosca Opdam, Asi Matathias, Carson Rick and Cécilia Tsan, together with pianist Zachary Deak, could be heard again in a week’s time at the first of this year’s “Sunday Afternoon Concerts in the Dome” at Mount Wilson Observatory, the series as ever under Ms. Tsan's curatorship as Artistic Director.

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Mason House Concert, 3484 Redwood Ave., Mar Vista, CA 90066, 6:00 p.m., Saturday, May 16, 2026.

Images: The performance: Todd Mason; Moszkowski and Dvořák: Wikimedia Commons.

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