PERFORMING ARTS

Capitol Woodwind Quintet

Perhaps it's due to the eat-your-spinach mentality prevalent in the marketing of classical music, but few ensembles nowadays have shown themselves to be particularly interested in or adept at playing light, delightful music. Thus the concert of French wind music that the Capitol Woodwind Quintet and pianist Francis Conlon presented at the Church of the Annunciation on Sunday was a breath of fresh air, as the musicians blended their tones and phrased their melodies with the kind of skill that makes everything sound effortless and the kind of spirit that makes everything enjoyable.

Indeed, much of the program would have fallen flat with less-than-effervescent playing. Claude Arrieu's Quintet in C may be a bit too charming, all perky rhythms and bright harmonies without even a glimpse of a shadow; Camille Saint-Saens's "Caprice on Danish and Russian Airs" for piano, flute, oboe and clarinet, written for the composer to play on a Russian tour, has so little musical material connecting its lovely tunes that it reeks of audience-pandering. Yet the quintet made the Arrieu frolic and swing, and Conlon's swagger helped keep the Saint-Saens from dragging too much.

Given more to work with in "L'Heure de Berger," a hilarious suite of quirky tunes depicting fops, pinup girls and club-hoppers by the sadly underheard composer Jean Francaix, Conlon and the quintet played with just the right light touch and gracious style. Yet the musicians found the gravity in the tempestuous passages of Francis Poulenc's sextet for winds and piano, making the lavish lyricism of the Divertissement second movement and the cathartic chords that close the work all the more welcome.

-- Andrew Lindemann Malone

Festa della Voce

Pianists Kathryn Brake and Carlos Cesar Rodriguez were the best part of the Festa della Voce's concert at the Swiss Embassy on Sunday. Titled "Made in Switzerland," the concert featured works by composers native to, or associated with, that country. Both pianists firmly grasped each song's stylistic essence, giving voice to Franz Liszt's stormy orchestral onslaughts and Wagner's seething harmonic sensuality while offering the singers precise, detailed attention.

The four-member vocal ensemble's somewhat unorthodox program combined the songs of composers relatively unknown here -- Othmar Schoeck, Hermann Suter and Paul Kletzki -- with staples by Tchaikovsky, Honegger and Brahms in addition to Liszt and Wagner. Kletzki was one of the countless emigres from Nazi Europe whose music continues to be introduced regularly to Washington audiences by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Austrian Embassy.

The afternoon peaked with Brahms's robust "Eleven Gypsy Songs," the singers combining the composer's zesty rhythmic energy with the lusty abandon of folk music. Baritone James Rogers brought a keen sense of humanity to Kletzki's Opus 11 songs and to Tchaikovsky's Opus 38, which was unleashed with every vigorous ounce of Tolstoy's Russian poetry. The other singers' efforts fell somewhat short, though soprano Mary McReynolds gave telling dramatic conviction to Honegger's "Deux Chants d'Ariel," while the composer's "Petit Cours de Morale" was approached sensitively by tenor Peter Joshua Burroughs. But mezzo Jessi Baden missed the voluptuously tinged innuendoes of Wagner's "Wesendonck" songs, her voice often below pitch, her dynamic level unvaried and the music's agonizing beauty left untouched.

-- Cecelia Porter