Dolce Suono Revisited

Philadelphia Music Makers
Vol. 6, No. 1 Spring 2007
by Tom Purdom

When I previewed Mimi Stillman’s Dolce Suono chamber series several issues ago, I had not, of course, actually attended a Dolce Suono program. I had heard Mimi Stillman play, I was impressed with the quality of the musicians she had recruited for her enterprise, and I felt she had promising talents as a cultural entrepreneur. I was also intrigued by the sight of a young flutist who had opted to combine a major music career with all the effort that goes into a doctorate in history. But Dolce Suono was still a new organization which had yet to play its first concert.
Well, Dolce Suono is approaching the end of its second season. I have attended six of its concerts and can now write a preview based on direct experience. If you like chamber music, you’re missing a treat if you haven’t been attending this series. The musicians listed in the original prospectus have all lived up to my expectations, and their young leader has added two other names that show she has a gift for picking colleagues – pianist Charles Abramovic and guitarist Allen Krantz.
I have heard many performances of Villa-Lobos’ Jet Whistle but I kept hearing details in the flute and cello parts that I had never heard before when Stillman and cellist Yumi Kendall played it at their season’s opener. The Dolce Suono version of Mozart’s Concerto for Flute and Harp, with Elizabeth Hainen at the harp, was played with so much verve I came away thinking it was the best performance of that piece I’d heard, even though the soloists were accompanied by a string quartet rather than the full orchestra customarily employed.
The surprise of the January program was a rare performance of a trio for flute, viola, and double bass by Erwin Schulhoff, a composer who was one of the victims of the Holocaust. Schulhoff treated his novel forces with an inventiveness and emotional depth that would have earned the trio a prominent place in the repertoire if it had been written for a less eccentric combination. And those are only three of the gems and novelties that have been available, without admission charge, in some of the nicest chambers at Penn.
The next Dolce Suono concert is titled “Baroque Banquet” and will feature music by the Big Three of the High Baroque – Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi. It will be performed by four of the regulars; Mimi Stillman, violinist Hirono Oka, cellist Yumi Kendall, and harpsichordist Jeremy Gill. A newcomer, Donna Morein, is a Philadelphia-born mezzo soprano currently in Germany who sports a list of appearances that includes most of the bases the best young vocalists touch. Will she give us more evidence that the impresario behind Dolce Suono knows how to assemble an able crew? I will be very surprised if she doesn’t.
Dolce Suono’s “Baroque Banquet,” Wednesday, April 11, 7:30pm, Rosenwald Gallery, 6th floor, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, University of Pennsyvlania.
215-898-7088. DolceSuonoSeries@aol.com