Camarada Chamber Ensemble Returns to the Mingei International Museum

By Ken Herman, San Diego Story

One of the virtues of the chamber music collective Camarada is the ease with which a wide variety of performers successfully collaborate with its core players. Thursday’s season-opening Camarada concert at the Mingei International Museum featured marimba virtuoso Michael Jones as guest soloist with Camarada regulars flutist Beth Ross Buckley, violist Travis Maril, cellist Abe Liebhaber, and pianist Dana Burnett.

(l. to r.) Dana Burnett, Travis Maril, Abe Liebhaber, Beth Ross Buckley, Oliviana Marie & Michael Jones [Photo courtesy of Camarada]

Two works on the program showcased the marimba, Michael Torke’s 2005 After the Forest Fire—a piece commissioned by marimba virtuoso Makoto Nakura—and Oliviana Marie’s The Elements, a new work commissioned by Camarada. In a 2015 concert at Bread & Salt, Camarada performed After the Forest Fire, and it was rewarding to encounter this agile and sensuous work again. The composer has assigned lyrical solos to the flute and cello, gracefully delivered by Beth Ross Buckley and Abe Liebhaber, but James’ syncopated, dancing marimba flourishes proved the most memorable contribution to the character of thie work.

In her quintet The Elements, composer Oliviana Marie included both piano and marimba, but Dana Burnett’s stylish, jazzy piano excursions tended to steal the show and overshadow the marimba. Each of the four traditional elements has its own movement in The Elements, and Marie’s sparkling contrapuntal textures as well as her inventive themes reveal a sophisticated flair for a 21-year-old student who is studying music at the University of Southern California. However, she has already composed and staged four musical theater works, and several of her compositions have won impressive awards. Marie is a composer to watch!

I was impressed with Zoltán Kodaly’s single movement Adagio for viola and piano, as well as Travis Maril’s transcendent account of this late Romantic gem filled with haunting modal themes wrapped in glowing harmonies. Composed in 1905 just as Kodaly was beginning his intensive investigation of Middle European folk music, this Adagio shows none of that traditional music’s ancient characteristics, but sounds more like an homage to Johannes Brahms. Maril’s rich sonority and subtle dynamic shaping was eloquently supported by Dana Burnett’s burnished piano collaboration.

Camarada Artistic Director Beth Ross Buckley opened this program with Trois Aquarelles (Three Watercolors) for flute, cello and piano by Phillipe Gaubert, an obscure French composer who flourished in the last century between the World Wars. In almost five decades of reviewing, I have never encountered this composer, but music historians tell us that in his day he was a well-known concert flutist and conductor in Europe. The animated contrapuntal lyricism and harmonic style in this chamber work are indebted to the style Gabriel Fauré, who taught most of the French composers of Gaubert’s generation. Beth Ross Buckley brought her customary flair and supple sonority to the ample flute solos in these three short pieces, and her antiphonal exchanges with cellist Abe Liebhaber in the elegiac middle movement proved exceptionally winning.

This concert was presented by Camarada in the recital hall of Balboa Park’s Mingei International Museum on October 24, 2024.