Washington Classical Review
Rarities for winds provide a breezy Chamber Music Society program at Wolf Trap
Mon Nov 11, 2024. By Charles T. Downey
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center brought a program devoted to combinations of wind instruments to the Barns at Wolf Trap Sunday afternoon. The presenter announced this summer that this will be its last season under Wu Han as artistic director. Wolf Trap credits her with significantly increasing attendance for chamber music concerts at the Barns, not least because of these performances by CMS of Lincoln Center.
This program followed a familiar formula: a major, rarely performed work, Poulenc’s Sextet for winds and piano, introduced by other little-known pieces for combinations of the same instruments. Horn player Radek Baborák and pianist Anne-Marie McDermott gave an elegiac rendition of Reinhold Glière’s Four Pieces for Horn and Piano. Extracted from another collection of chamber music for unusual pairings, the first two pieces in the set were composed for clarinet and piano.