The LA Wind Sextet Return to Mason House

REVIEW

The Los Angeles Wind Sextet play Bach, Thuille, Kreutzer, and Gershwin

JOHN STODDER

One of the many pleasures of attending Mason House concerts is the intimate connection between the audience and the musicians that share the living room. In addition to listening to expertly performed pieces from the classical and modern chamber music repertoire, you get something extra from being able to watch the musicians at such proximity. The connection between them and the audience was especially vital at this concert.

Proof of life

If you’re a fan of serious music, a wind ensemble sounds like something fun and different from most chamber music, which tends to lean toward strings and piano. I remember at about age 14 falling in love with a recording of Stravinsky’s Octet for Wind Instruments, because it had such an unusual sound. This concert helped me to understand more fully what a unique place small wind ensembles occupy in classical music—the collective and conscientious labor of love required for the players of these disparate instruments to fuse their collaboration together.

Each wind instrument has a distinct construction, technique, and centuries of history that must be bridged with the others, which have equally thorny issues, to create an ensemble sound. The LA Wind Sextet features two instruments with double reeds, one with a single reed, one brass instrument, and a flute.

l-r: Judith Farmer, bassoon; Susan Greenberg, flute; Amy Jo Rhine, horn; Burt Hara, clarinet;
Jonathan Davis, oboe; Kevin Fitz-Gerald, piano.

Each performer uses a different tool in a different way, most of them radically unlike one another. The horn player, performing on the only brass instrument in a traditional wind quintet, buzzes their lips against the mouthpiece as they blow; the double reed players induce two small pieces of cane to vibrate against each other in just the right way; the clarinetist must blow down his stick-like instrument to make a wooden reed oscillate against the mouthpiece; while the flautist directs an airstream across an opening so that it strikes one edge just hard enough to fill the room with beautiful sound.

Playing wind instruments is the ultimate proof of life. As flautist Susan Greenberg explained during an invaluable post-concert Q&A, she must breathe twice as hard as the other wind players to be as loud as they are, because only half of her air goes into the instrument. Finally, all five of the wind instruments could fit inside the sixth member of this particular sextet: a grand piano with its felt-covered hammers and taut metal strings. Imagine the challenge of balancing all of this in live performance, with each player occupying their own island of unique factors to deal with.

Gershwin like never before

The highlight of this terrific concert was the final piece. I’ve heard Rhapsody in Blue in concert a few times, but never before able to watch, from 10 feet away, a clarinetist (Burt Hara) prepare to play the opening glissando—literally readying himself to launch the five greatest seconds of American music ever written. He wiped the inside of his instrument with what looked like a silk cloth, filled his lungs with air, tapped his music stand, adjusted how he was sitting, and waggled his fingers to loosen them for an extended musical journey. Hara’s an easygoing, witty performer, but was suddenly in motion agitating to unleash, abruptly and loudly, what George Gershwin called the “wail” that opens the piece.

Gershwin by Miguel Covarrubias, 1925.

Watching and hearing the LA Wind Sextet perform it in a small room was an unforgettable experience. It belongs on your bucket list if you love American music: Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington… be jealous! Even though there were only six instruments, I’ve never heard Rhapsody in Blue louder, nor have the work’s details and nuances ever manifested more clearly.

I would never have thought to apply “less is more” to this ambitious piece, but with the individual voices playing key passages in groups of two and three, Gershwin’s harmonic writing never sounded so clear, brilliant, and yet in some ways unfamiliar. The five wind players —in addition to Hara and Greenberg, we heard Jonathan Davis on oboe, Judith Farmer on bassoon and Amy Jo Rhine on horn—were mesmerizing.

However, the real star of the Gershwin was pianist Kevin Fitz-Gerald, because Rhapsody in Blue is in effect a piano concerto, a dialogue between soloist and orchestra. Fitz-Gerald’s way was not to dominate the piece, but to adopt a hybrid approach, playing solo passages like a headliner, then dropping back into the chamber music web when the score allowed him to make aural space for his ensemble-mates, then re-emerging with the force of thunder.

A mighty fortress

Medieval manuscript copy of Ein feste Burg.

The concert opened with a piece based on a song I recall singing in my elementary school choir, in the years before religious music was forbidden because it was, in effect, prayer in the school: Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott. Sung in English, it was known as “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.”

Based on a composition from the 1520s, attributed to Martin Luther and referred to by Lutherans as “The Battle Hymn of the Reformation,” in around 1707 J. S. Bach turned it into a chorale prelude for organ (BWV 720) that is less martial and more ethereal. The piece began with a statement of that instantly familiar theme on bassoon by Farmer, but the solo diverts from it almost immediately and is joined by the other instruments in a series of duet and trio variations, through which fragments of the melody float like ghosts. The elegant orchestration for wind quintet was by Mordechai Rechtman, himself a bassoonist and leader of the Israel Woodwind Quintet.

Introducing Thuille and Kreutzer

The next two pieces, that straddled the intermission, were by composers with whom I was not familiar, Ludwig Wilhelm Andreas Maria Thuille from Austria (1861-1907) and the German Conradin Kreutzer (1780-1849). They were both significant German-speaking composers who contributed to the development of romantic music, albeit from different timelines.

Kreutzer was a transitional figure from Classicism to early Romanticism, his music reflecting the simple melodic emphasis of that period, and most known for his songs and operas, particularly A Night in Granada, a Romantic opera about a prince and a peasant girl. Thuille, born 12 years after Kreutzer’s death, reflected the changes in Romantic music as the 19th century unfolded. Like many composers of his generation, he was influenced by Johannes Brahms, as well as by his lifelong friend Richard Strauss, and by the greater complexity of the late Romantics. Thuille wrote in many genres, including opera, but is most highly regarded now for his chamber music.

Ludwig Thuille.

His most celebrated work is the one we heard at Mason House, his Sextet for piano and woodwind quintet, Op. 6; Strauss was said to be instrumental in getting it premiered in 1888. At least 10 recordings exist on streaming media, and it is a popular choice for wind ensembles. Indeed, this concert was the second time this buried classic of late Romanticism has been featured at Mason House.

What struck me this time was how radically its mood shifts. Thuille begins it one way but ends it very differently. The 10-minute-long first movement is noble in feeling, a Beethovenian narrative in tribute to a conquering hero. As with the Gershwin arrangement, the ensemble seemed bigger than just six players, almost orchestral. The instruments paired up to create a large palette of effects, for example Rhine’s horn and Farmer’s bassoon blending in what sounded like a royal procession. The Larghetto, almost as long, slows the pace but seems otherwise a continuation of the first movement’s stately, unhurried style, the main difference being the pianist’s greater prominence, as well as several achingly beautiful horn passages.

Things change quite a bit with the third movement Gavotte, which opens with a more animated theme first on oboe and then passed around the winds before settling on the piano. The movement gradually gains momentum and becomes quite magical, like a music box or a cuckoo clock. Whereas the first two movements struck me as formal, this one was mock-formal, as if children had snuck on the stage to make fun of their elders’ stiffness.

The finale is even livelier—light and airy and a world away from the first movement’s solemnity—and characterized by ensemble play and only brief solo passages, as the musicians seemed to relax and enjoy the faster pace as a kind of liberation dance. This last movement was one of the better opportunities in the concert for the LA Wind Sextet members to flash their virtuoso skills.

Conradin Kreutzer.

As Kreutzer’s Trio in E-flat major for clarinet, bassoon and piano, Op. 43, began, we were brought back into a more formal mood. With only three instruments instead of six, the performers (Hara, Farmer, and Fitz-Gerald) each had more room to make their impressions on the listeners—and repeatedly rose to the occasion. In contrast with Thuille, Kreutzer’s composition looked back, recalling Haydn or early Beethoven, adhering to the Classical aesthetic.

The second movement, Andante grazioso, was gorgeous, highlighting Hara’s rich tone on clarinet, contrasted at times with the lower registers of the bassoon for a pleasing effect. The third movement was the dessert. The trio left behind the deliberate pace of the first two movements and gave us music played with increasing energy and theatricality, including three false endings. After the second one, I wrote in my notebook, “Fun, fun, fun.” It’s a charming piece that doesn’t deserve its obscurity.

Judith Farmer, Burt Hara, and Kevin Fitz-Gerald play
Kreutzer’s Trio, Op. 43.

What we learned

The performers are all expert musicians but also charming people with senses of humor, which they displayed during the closing Q&A. Another feature was the pre-concert talk by LA Opus Managing Editor, David Brown (below), an English-born amateur classical music scholar whose erudition and research prowess gave the audience vital context for understanding the concert and the compositions, especially helpful in preparing us to hear Thuille and Kreutzer.

In his talk Brown admitted that in the past the British music community had “pigeonholed Gershwin as a writer of popular music.” Of course he was—with his brother Ira one of the most revered Broadway songwriting teams, who composed standards like Fascinating Rhythm, The Man I Love, and I Got Rhythm for hit shows in the 1920s and 1930s.

However, his success in that field had meant to earlier generations of British classical buffs that Gershwin “was not to be taken seriously as a composer for the concert hall or the opera house. It took me emigrating to America to realize not only that Gershwin is cherished here as an absolutely central figure in 20th century American music, but also that the division between ‘popular’ and ‘classical’—or as I’d rather call it, concert music— is nowhere near as pronounced here as it is in Britain or in continental Europe.”

Jazz bandleader Albert Ayler famously said, “Music is the healing force of the universe.” Maybe that quote comes to mind because Ayler was also a wind player (tenor saxophone), like the LA Wind Sextet breathing life into music. The Mason House concerts now regularly sell out, and there has clearly been a lot of audience turnover, with more attendees encouraged by the publicity and word-of-mouth the series has enjoyed lately to venture from their homes to hear music at its finest. We began this concert as mostly strangers, but you could feel it: this concert created a bond. Great music is how we will get through all this.

---ooo---

Mason Home Concerts, 3484 Redwood Ave., Mar Vista, CA 90066, Saturday, April 18, 2026,, 6:00 p.m.

Images: The performance: Todd Mason; Gershwin, Ein feste Burg manuscript, Thuille, Kreutzer: Wikimedia Commons.