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The Frick’s New Concert Hall Makes Small Ensembles Sound Huge
The inaugural concert filled the room, and the audience, with intensity.
It’s not only that we were just about all close enough to the musicians to notice the sparkles on violist Richard O’Neill’s shoes or the way violinist Harumi Rhodes dances in her seat (and sometimes right up out of it); it’s that the notes landed on the ear with all their subtlety and force intact. Here, thanks to the acoustic engineers at Arup, you could make out the slight thump of a finger on a violin neck, the hiss of the bow, the quiver of a tremolo, the way a note leaves a soft trail as it leaps to the next. The piece has a literary cast — Janáček based it on Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata — and the players kept the characters sharp, veering between tender romance and gnashing outbursts in the third movement, or indulging in the full-throated melancholy of the fourth.
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