Lincoln Center’s Chamber Players Masters of Virtuosity

Epic in dimensions if not intentions, and bursting with sunny tunes, Schubert’s Octet makes an occasion of itself whenever it appears. Thursday it turned up in the awesomely assured hands of members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, for a Chamber Music in Historic Sites concert in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

Beginning with symphonic breadth and rhetoric, the Octet then winds a leisurely way through instrumental song and dance to end in something very like an opera overture. Its anxieties may be fleeting and its tensions melodramatic, but that does not preclude sincerity of sentiment nor undermine its expansive lyric development.

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In any case, the Lincoln Center emissaries emphasized its richness of expression and its sharp contrasts of sound and spirit. Violinists Joseph Silverstein and Kerry McDermott, violist Paul Neubauer, cellist Fred Sherry, bassist Edgar Meyer, clarinetist David Shifrin, bassoonist Kim Walker and horn player Robert Routch proved masters of convivial virtuosity.

Most important, a common sense of inner rhythmic life animated even the most placid moments and sustained the playing’s purpose as well as its passion. This was characteristically singing Schubert, but it was also uncommonly goal-oriented Schubert, and the stronger for it.

Stories about the origin of the Octet vary, but it was clearly modeled upon the Opus 20 Septet of Beethoven, which preceded it here. The Lincoln Center musicians negotiated that with brio and bite, more concentrated in sound and line than their mellower Schubert. In a few places their playfulness verged on exaggeration, tweaking contextual proprieties as a sort of in-joke.

Throughout the concert they had to contend with a rumbling ventilation system, which from some seats sounded like another bass. Their playing, however, showed no sign of adversity, pristine in texture and cohesive in maneuver at all times.