Concert Review: St Matthew’s Music Guild

By DAN WOOD | Contributing Writer

Here is a local enterprise you really have to know about. I am excited to tell you that I have been to just two of their performances, and have come away completely charmed and enamored.

It is called the St. Matthew’s Music Guild and they present concerts every month or so at St. Matthew’s Church in Pacific Palisades, an elegant, comfortable, modern and delightful space.

I’ve only seen two concerts, one a piano recital and the other a performance by their 35-piece Chamber Orchestra at St. Matthew’s, which performed with a world-class pianist.

Each concert is preceded by a wonderfully erudite and yet accessible talk about the evening’s music, the performer or the composer—or all of the above.

I have learned things that helped me appreciate the performance far more—such as that Fanny Mendelssohn was Felix’s older sister and wrote at least 450 compositions that were little known beyond her own small circle of family, community and friends. Both she and Felix died, months apart, at very young ages (she at 42, he at 38, from stroke)—which had hit their family regularly in the past.

I also learned that Beethoven’s “Fourth Piano Concerto” is considered, side by side with his “Fifth,” his best, and that Beethoven himself completely botched a concert by not following his own “repeat” marking—while self-conducting a small chamber orchestra in a theatre, mid-winter, with no heat.

Earlier this year, I saw David Kaplan play a keenly designed program of Ligeti, Anthony Cheung, Kaiia Saariaho and Andrea Casarrubios capped with Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” easily the most gentle, fluid, non-percussive—and therefore refreshingly uplifting—rendering of that chestnut of chestnuts I’ve ever heard.

Before beginning, Kaplan followed through verbally on what host and “liner note” host Tom Neenan had already brushstroked—what is the place of improvisation by the great music masters, and how do you recognize it? The insights helped the audience into the music and focus attention on the key issues to be aware of as the concert unfolded.

Then, we saw Ukrainian virtuoso Inna Faliks play Beethoven’s “Fourth Piano Concerto” with strength, ease and consummate musicality. What a thrill.

Both concerts took me back decades when I reviewed Boston concerts locally for the Christian Science Monitor. The quality of artists passing through Boston was the best of the best in the world, and I, possibly unconsciously, or by default, became elitist and spoiled quickly. I have been bragging to others for years how great these concerts were and have missed them terribly.

Seeing these two concerts at the St. Matthew’s Music Guild has returned me to those arcadian days of my earlier journalism career and I am thrilled to see—and hear—that this world-class quality is available regularly right here in my own Los Angeles back yard.

St. Matthew’s Music Guild will conclude its 38th season on June 2 at 8 p.m. with a world premiere of David Conte’s “A Hymn To Life”—a Music Guild commission in memory of Fred Doering.

The concert will feature Tyler Hunt (steel drum), The Choir and Soloists of St. Matthew’s Parish, and The Chamber Orchestra at St. Matthew’s.

For more information or to purchase tickets, visit musicguildonline.org.