Buffalo Music: Buffalo Chamber Players mix the obscure and the sublime

By Dale Anderson
(Image above: A press photo of Rose Vrbsky with her contrabassoon)

At a Buffalo Chamber Players’ Bach & Brews concert, you never know quite what’s going to happen. Wednesday night in the subterranean Ninth Ward cabaret at Asbury Hall was no exception.

Was anybody ready for the contrabassoon? I mean, this is a woodwind so odd and obscure and ungainly and so much lower in tone than anything else that it almost never gets the spotlight. In an introductory chat, Rose Vrbsky confessed that in three years with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, her contrabassoon had gotten to perform the melody just once.

Equally uncommon were the four brief movements of 18th century German composer Count Friedrich Karl of Erbach’s “Divertissements melodieux,” where duets between her and bassoonist Ellen Barnum seemed like conversations between cartoon characters — a long-legged stork and a hippopotamus.

Another seldom-heard instrument, the harpsichord, with BPO’s Abigail Rockwood at the keys, got chances to peek through next in the delightful dynamics of Corelli’s “Concerto Grosso in G Minor.” Known as the Christmas Concerto, it’s believed to date back to late 1600s.

After intermission, BCP founder and violist Janz Castelo de Armas recounted how the ensemble emerged about 20 years ago from weekly sessions at his house where he taught his young Buffalo Philharmonic colleagues how to play dominos. Then he and another domino player, violinist Shieh-Jian Tsai, recreated another one of their pastimes from those days, romping through Mozart’s “Duo for Violin and Viola in G Major.”

Finishing off the evening and fulfilling this concert’s seasonal theme was what must have been the global warming version of “Winter” from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” It was really, really hot, so hot that we gasped as Philharmonic violinist Aleksandar Ivanov zipped through its notoriously difficult movements like a speed skater on thin ice.

The next Buffalo Chamber Players concert brings Buffalo Philharmonic concertmaster Nikki Chooi and his internationally acclaimed younger brother, Timothy, to the stage upstairs in Asbury Hall on Friday, Dec. 11. Will it be a night of violin fireworks? You bet.