Ronen Chamber Ensemble ends season with provocative contrasts and return of clarinetist co-founder

A salutary look at cultural and environmental loss, flecked with characteristic humor, put into

David Bellman came back to town to play with current Ronen members and guests.

perspective a deeply resonant pair of pre-modernist English works Sunday aftternoon as the Ronen Chamber Ensemble opened its season's finale at St. Paul's Episcopal Church.

Michael Schelle's "Kurashikku" was like auditory cataract surgery, clarifying the vision of a few classic themes dear to composers and painters for centuries. The title is Japanese for "classic," and those time-honored themes are "Old Buildings," "The Babbling Brook," "Deep Dark Forests," Rainbows and Sunsets," and "Furry Four-legged Friends."

Each movement has a parenthetical subtitle of its own, pointing to a 21st-century undercutting of the sentimental attachments artists make to such images. For the first movement, we learn we ought to regard "old buildings [as] standing once proud of their past, but now vacant, ghostly, condemned." 

The instrumentation involves the flute and the clarinet calling de profundis: Alistair Howlett and Campbell MacDonald playing bass flute and bass clarinet, respectively, to start with. The third player, Gregory Martin, provides a hypnotic, tolling backdrop at the piano. The resonance of the church setting made the first movement especially evocative of hollowed-out spaces in our environments and our lives.

Later the wind players' higher-register conventional instruments are brought into play. As observed Sunday in Howlett's case, he appears to be missing his C flute when he wants to make the transition from the bass flute, finds it nearby, and moves back into position. But MacDonald is waxing eloquent on the bass clarinet and the flutist has to wait, projecting a spell of impatience. 

The waggish suite concludes with the "furry friends" becoming urban rats in the manner of Manhattan rodents, menacing and exuberant in their hospitable neighborhoods. 

Leading up to intermission in this program (to be repeated today at 7:30 p.m. at the Indiana History Center) is a charming flute-piano duo from Ralph Vaughan Williams in the first phase of his mastery. Before the cataclysm of the First World War, a piece like "Suite de Ballet" could pick up on a mood of settled pleasures, despite the simultaneous emergence of modernism. Vaughan Williams had a fresh perspective on musical forms with the common touch, with a regard for folk music that persisted. 

Its four movements displayed straightforward rapport of  flutist and pianist. The lively rhythmic profile of the second-movement "Humoresque" was especially telling, and set up its successor, a stately "Gavotte." Such a balance allowed the duo  to ascend to a virtuoso finish in the smoothly negotiated peppiness of the "Passepied." There the audience's imagination could well flash-backward to the vitality that once animated the "Old Buildings" celebrated in the Schelle piece.

The crowning achievement of the Ronen season farewell was the elaborate "Nonet," named after the infrequently used designation of a work for nine solo players, by the Victorian composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912).  Inspired by the music of Dvorak as well as by his identification with the African diaspora, Coleridge-Taylor had a strong reputation in his native England through a fairly prolific output.

"Nonet" is a work for four winds (oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon), four strings (violin, viola, cello and double bass), and piano. The first-class ensemble, drawn largely from the curent Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, was conducted by Trae Blanco, director of bands at Butler University. "Nonet"  is catalogued as Coleridge-Taylor's opus 2, and was unpublished as of 1980, when it appears among his works in the New Grove Dictionary.

It's hard to resist quoting from the entry on Coleridge-Taylor, which I'm glad not to have read until after hearing "Nonet" for the first time at Sunday's concert. Of the composer's music, it's said: "Too often it relies on the wholesale repetition of a motif which is not strong or flexible  enough to bear it, and consequently verges on the banal."

Boy, you can say that again! There was such extensive echoing and repeating and recasting of little bits of music that cohesiveness in Sunday's concert was almost guaranteed. But that's not to take away from the control Blanco compatibly applied to the professional ensemble, which assuredly has never performed chamber music before with this exact personnel. 

The piece nevertheless displayed an abundance of craftsmanship, despite a certain wallowing in its materials. There was a soaring as well as a lingering melodic richness in the Andante con moto movement. And there was an attractive, comic-opera buoyancy in the scherzo, with a predictable tenderness in contrast for the movement's trio section. The finale had a broadly symphonic feeling, which seemed authentic enough to produce a fitting atmosphere of peak celebration as the Ronen Chamber Ensemble wrapped up another season under the direction of Jennifer Christen, Alistair Howlett, Gregory Martin, and Jayna Park.