Picnic Concert

The Music Academy’s annual Picnic Concert series, which ended last Thursday, extends an invitation for us to eat, drink and be generally merry in elegant fashion, and then partake of concerts by students in the sumptuously renovated Hahn Hall. The program is always TBA (to be announced) and diverse, like a picnic basket full of treats.

Last Thursday, the air was bittersweet for the swan song event. The program’s prize was Sergei Prokofiev’s Quintet in G Minor. A mutant group of string and woodwind players gave a potent reading of a piece by turns jaunty, angular, and tuneful. It’s got that Prokofiev piquancy we know and increasingly love, a palatable 20th-century aesthetic.

We heard two pieces by Johannes Brahms-the Zwei Ges¤nge, Op. 91, sung beauteously by mezzo-soprano Ana Mihanovic, and the Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in A, Op. 100, featuring violinist Ji Eun Kim and pianist Liang-yu Wang, in fine form. Sheer violin virtuosity came via Pablo de Sarasate’s showpiece Carmen Fantasy, which was played with precision and panache by Chinese player Tianjie Lu (His pianist partner Danielle Naler introduced the piece and her Beijing-based collaborator by saying that “this could be an Olympic event”).