St. Paul Chamber Orchestra returns to the virtual stage with 'Lamentations'

When the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra offered its first livestreamed concert in nearly five months Saturday night, it seemed worth celebrating. But the SPCO apparently wanted to make certain we don't skip any of the stages of grief.

There's a lot to process at this point in human history, including the recent killings in Georgia. Hence, "Lamentations" was a timely focus for a concert that offered perspectives on loss, from 20th-century American composer Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Mozart and Brahms.

While it didn't feature the complete orchestra — you'll likely have to wait until fall for that — it did show off the skills and emotional eloquence of eight members in various configurations. And the piece that I suspect will stay with me the longest is the opener, which gave Saturday's program its title: Perkinson's "Lamentations: Black/Folk Song Suite" for solo cello.

The SPCO's principal cellist, Julie Albers, took the stage alone, reminding us of the intimate power a single voice can summon. Albers delivered a gripping performance of a piece that deserves wider attention.

While it would have been lovely to be at St. Paul's Ordway Concert Hall, this was a case in which the camera work made it far more involving. Just as a great dance performance can inspire your admiration for what the human body can accomplish, so did watching Albers' arms and hands wring varied emotions from Perkinson's piece, particularly on the stark, sorrowful "Calvary Ostinato."

The rest of the concert was not so disarmingly intimate, although Mozart's G minor String Quintet came close, thanks to microphones on the bridge of every instrument. The horse hair of each bow sliding across a string was resonant, the player's inhalations audible. The sense of a shared confidence was strongest on the sad slow movement, the emotional linchpin of a piece that Mozart wrote during his father's final illness.

When Brahms was mourning his mother, he wrote one of his biggest and most powerful works, his "German Requiem." But he also expressed a quieter side of his grief in his Horn Trio in E-flat, on which a violin and piano are joined by the instrument Brahms' father played, French horn. After an hour of strictly strings, the sonic changeup of James Ferree's French horn and Hanna Hyunjung Kim's piano proved welcome to the ear.

Alas, the horn too often slid into the shadows of its bigger voiced companions, especially when pianist Kim and violinist Eunice Kim aggressively exchanged phrases. Not until the work's third movement did Ferree's instrument step forward to sing out its own lamentation. It may have been the most spare and simple section of the whole concert, but it was also the most moving, Ferree's horn conveying a tone of sad resignation.

Unlike the Minnesota Orchestra performances that can be viewed at your leisure, SPCO concerts are appointment viewing. This one will be repeated on the orchestra's website at 7 p.m. Thursday. Four more livestreamed concerts have been scheduled from the Ordway, following the same pattern. They'll all be chamber music, but the musicians will have premiered five new pieces by season's end. There will be some Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Mendelssohn mixed in, too.

Rob Hubbard is a freelance classical music critic. • wordhub@yahoo.com

Who: Members of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.
Where: Repeat at 7 p.m. Thursday at thespco.org.