Camarada’s Program of ‘Harmonic Indulgence’ at the Mingei Museum

By Ken Herman, San Diego Story

Camarada returned to the Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park Thursday to present a concert titled by Artistic Director Beth Ross Buckley ‘Luscious: an evening of harmonic indulgence.’

Elena Mashkovtseva, Travis Maril, and Beth Ross Buckley. Photo by Monique Feil Photography [photo (c.) Dana Greene]

Camarada returned to the Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park Thursday to present a concert titled by Artistic Director Beth Ross Buckley Luscious: an evening of harmonic indulgence. Five regular Camarada musicians offered a selection of chamber music in approachable styles from the early decades of the 20th Century.

Like Camarada’s concert at the Mingei Museum last fall, this program opened with a work by Philippe Gaubert, an influential 20th-century French composer and conductor between the two World Wars. Because he was also a virtuoso flutist, his works are highly appreciated by flute players, although today his work remains little known outside of that community.

Gaubert’s Medailles Antiques for flute, violin, and piano displays flowing, animated motifs set in a pastel post-Impressionist harmonic style. The second movement “Danses” offers ample florid flute excursions, deftly executed by Beth Ross Buckley. In this work,  pianist Dana Burnett and violinist David Buckley matched her commitment and finesse.

The most impressive work on this program was a Trio (H. 300?) by Bohuslav Martinu, a prolific early 20th-century Czech composer whose works have sadly fallen out of favor. To escape the provincialism of Czech nationalist music, the young Martinu joined the thriving musical scene in Paris between the World Wars, and this Trio displays the buoyant neoclassicism he adopted in the French capital.

Flutist Beth Ross Buckley revealed the charm of his ornate flute writing, especially in the opening “Poco Allegretto” movement, while pianist Dana Burnett deftly probed the pensive minor-mode prelude that opened the middle “Adagio.” The engaging third movement offers jubilant counterpoint in its outer sections, saving a contrasting, more harmonically challenging but intimate cantilena for the movement’s centerpiece, given apt eloquence by violist Travis Maril.

Gilad Cohen arranged several sections of Sergei Prokofiev’s expansive ballet score Romeo & Juliet in a trio for flute, viola, and harp. Although harpist Elena Mashkovtseva, Beth Ross Buckley and Travis Maril gave energetic, stylish accounts of four movements of Cohen’s Suite, they mainly reminded this listener how much the ballet relies on the orchestra’s lush, colorful sonority. Like Maurice Ravel, Prokofiev was a superb orchestrator.

Accompanied by Dana Burnett, violinist David Buckley gave winning accounts of two songs from George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess, arrangements made in the 1940s by the great Russian-American violinist Jascha Heifetz. I particularly enjoyed Buckley’s suave double stops in “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” Beth Ross Buckley, Travis Maril, and Dana Burnett gave a stylish account of an uncredited arrangement of Debussy’s popular piano solo “Claire de Lune.”

This concert was presented by Camarada at Balboa Park’s Mingei International Museum on March 27, 2025.