The Lantz/Kargul Duo – the violinist Ronald Lantz, of the Portland String Quartet, and the pianist Laura Kargul, director of keyboard studies at the University of Southern Maine – has staked a claim to Valentine’s Day, offering an annual concert of hot-blooded works on or near the holiday. This year’s installment, presented jointly by the Lark Society and the university, fell on Sunday, Valentine’s Day itself, and drew a large, enthusiastic audience to Woodfords Congregational Church.

The program, “From Northern Lights to Southern Nights,” was lightweight but appealingly eclectic. Mostly, it was built of short pieces – single movements from larger works like the Adagio from Christian Sinding’s Suite in A minor and “Le Soir” from Joseph Canteloube’s “Dans la Montagne” – and transcriptions. Novelties like Peter Ashbourne’s arrangements of two Jamaican folk songs were balanced against familiar showpieces like Gluck’s “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from “Orfeo ed Euridice.”

The program’s one substantial piece, Grieg’s three-movement Sonata No. 3 in C minor (Op. 45), benefited from a flexible reading that moved easily between the score’s moments of assertiveness and anxiety, and its dreamier, more relaxed passages. Most strikingly, the performance pointed up the ways in which Grieg’s harmonic ingenuity, and his gift for soaring melodies, set his music apart from the dominant Germanic mainstream, and helped establish an identifiable Norwegian style.

The Grieg closed the first half of the program, which was devoted to Scandinavian music (the “Northern Lights” of the title). Its companions were Sibelius’ short, sweet and vaguely melancholy Nocturne (Op. 51, No. 3) and the Sinding Adagio, an attractive, melodically direct piece that aims to charm rather than dazzle.

The Gluck transcription, a favorite of violinists in the early 20th century (and flutists, more recently), opened the second half of the program with a touch of elegance and serenity, qualities that also informed the languid Canteloube, to which Lantz brought a textured, throaty tone. The Ashbourne folk arrangements also had an appealing simplicity, but were not particularly memorable, and seemed decidedly non-tropical in these violin and piano versions. And a pair of works by the Argentinian tango composer Astor Piazzolla, “Milonga en Re” and “Soledad,” brought the concert to a vivid, slightly exotic close.

Occasional slips in Lantz’s intonation early in the program proved only fleetingly troublesome; in his best moments, he offered shapely playing that brought out the music’s poetry and spirit, qualities to which Kargul’s consistently solid, thoughtful readings also contributed amply.

Overall, the concert had a relaxed, homey spirit. Kargul offered chatty, generally amusing introductions to each work, with asides and amplifications from Lantz, and if these accounted for about half an hour of the concert’s two-hour running time, you could pick up some interesting tidbits. Most notably, Kargul passed along the observation of an Austrian friend who regards Arnold Schwarzenegger’s accent as inauthentic. And there was Kargul’s own impression, based on a letter of Grieg’s, that Maine and Norway are similar. The comparison was not, as you might suspect, based on chilly winters, but rather, on what Grieg described as annoying interruptions by a flood of “foreign visitors” during the summers.

The Lantz/Kargul Duo will repeat the program at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland on Wednesday, and at the Sanford-Springvale Historical Museum, in Springvale, on Feb. 21.

Allan Kozinn is a former music critic and culture writer for The New York Times who lives in Portland. He can be contacted at:

allankozinn@gmail.com

Twitter: kozinn

Copy the Story Link