Chamber Music Series's 40 Years of Concerts End on a Wistful Note

A silvery viola melody from Mozart's Divertimento in E-flat, one of the composer's perfect, late-in-life compositions, wings across a Bethesda synagogue. The musicians from the Divertimento Trio, named for this very work, play with the sense of common purpose and spontaneous creation that are essential to chamber music. It is another bracing, eminently refined afternoon at the National Institutes of Health's Chamber Music Series.

But there was something wistful about this performance last Sunday. The series has never quite seemed at home since it was forced to move to Temple Beth El. For its first 32 years, the concerts were performed to packed houses of 500 in the reverberant NIH hall nearby; now, in the temple's dry acoustics, the audience numbers around 200, mainly retired doctors and scientists.

And tomorrow afternoon, after 40 seasons, baritone Wolfgang Holzmair and pianist Russel Ryan will give a performance of Schubert's "Schwanengesang" ("Swan Song"), and the series will close its doors forever.

It is not the sort of ending that Paola Saffiotti might have envisioned when she helped start the series in 1968. Today Saffiotti, 82, is in the midst of an intense battle with cancer; yet in an interview last fall at her Glen Echo home, she spoke with her usual energy and eloquence. "When he heard the series was ending," she said, "Wolfgang called and said he wanted to sing. 'Paola,' he said, 'after all, you will have your swan song.' "

In its 40 seasons, with an average of 10 concerts a season, the series has presented a rainbow palette of famous and lesser-known artists and ensembles amounting to a picture of music in the second half of the 20th century: singers such as Holzmair and the contralto Ewa Podles; string quartets including the Tokyo Quartet and the Quartetto Italiano; and a particular focus on piano, with the likes of Richard Goode, Murray Perahia, Radu Lupu, András Schiff, Peter Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski.

"Paola always presents artists that have something musical, as well as technical, to say," says Frank Salomon, the New York-based presenter and manager of such artists as Goode and Simon Rattle, as well as an administrator of the legendary Marlboro Music School and Festival in Vermont, where Saffiotti is a trustee. "We live in a day where the virtuosic aspects of performance get the most attention. Not everyone can appreciate that someone can offer more than technique."

"You cannot underestimate the fact that an artist comes back to a series because of the people who present the concerts," says pianist Goode, an NIH regular. "You always got such a warm feeling from her."

If the NIH series had a particular flair, it was perhaps because it continued a tradition going back to 1864. That year marked the founding of Italy's most prestigious chamber music series, the Societa' del Quartetto di Milano -- commonly known as the Quartetto. Saffiotti was born and raised in Milan, and her father, Alfredo Amman, was for decades the driving force behind the Quartetto. The legendary pianist Rudolf Serkin forged such a bond with Amman that he performed in the series more than 40 times, according to Goode, a Serkin student who has often appeared in the Quartetto.

"Paola is a link to the past, to her father who knew Adolf Busch and Pablo Casals, who are my heroes," says András Schiff, another regular. "Playing on the series is like being a member of the family. That is the way it used to be in the Old World."

The NIH series was the brainchild of Giulio Cantoni, a fellow emigre who left Italy in 1940 to avoid Nazi persecution and, as a doctor at NIH, saw a gap between the vibrancy of the research underway at the Institutes and the city's cultural life. Having known Amman in Milan, he approached Saffiotti; she had worked with her father on the Quartetto, with a large presenting organization in Italy, and, after she married and moved with her husband Umberto to Chicago, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

"Then I came to Washington, and there was nothing here musically," Saffiotti recalled. "It was a wasteland. The Library of Congress only presented the Juilliard Quartet, and the Washington Performing Arts Society was just beginning, mostly with piano concerts. There was no chamber music."

For that first season in 1968-69, Saffiotti used her contacts and brought in a mix of artists who set the tone for the seasons ahead. Quartetto regulars including the keyboard poet Horszowski and superstar violinist Isaac Stern -- refusing a fee -- were joined by French flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal and cellist Leslie Parnas.

Saffiotti's contacts with the Quartetto led to small coups for her fledgling series, including the Washington debut of the great pianist Maurizio Pollini. Saffiotti is also close to Claudio Abbado, the former musical director of the Berlin Philharmonic; Abbado referred promising young musicians to his childhood friend -- among them the Auryn String Quartet and violinist Viviane Hagner. The series, sponsored by the Foundation for Advanced Education in the Sciences, soon grew to 10 concerts per season with more than 500 subscribers. "We were comfortable at NIH," says Saffiotti.

After Sept. 11, 2001, heightened security turned NIH into a fortress, and outside events such as the series had to go. The series entered into an inexorable spiral of declining subscriptions and whipsawing venue changes, first to a Bethesda private school (uninterested administration) and then the synagogue (poor rehearsal arrangements). Cantoni remained series chairman until he passed away in 2005.

Saffiotti chalks up the plunge to aging audiences, as well as the wider availability of high-end chamber music. Others view the series's end more ominously. "It is another nail in the coffin," says Schiff. "It creates a vacuum. People seem not to care about music that is made at an intimate level, which is essentially what music is about, not the big, large and spectacular."

Organizations such as the Library of Congress and the Kennedy Center's Fortas series maintain vibrant schedules, which might argue against dour assessments. Yet it is hard to escape the idea that something intangible and important will be lost on Sunday when the last bars of the Schubert trail off and the NIH series goes silent, closing that pipeline to Marlboro, Europe and Schiff's burnished "Old World."

As Anne McLean, a senior concert producer at the Library of Congress, puts it, "It was always a very noncommercial series that was run from the heart."