http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/arts/music/camerata-rco-joins-the-pianist-weiyin-chen-at-subculture.html 2014-09-15 23:52:09 Camerata RCO Joins the Pianist Weiyin Chen at SubCulture It was a classical music night at SubCulture, a performance space on Bleecker Street, as the pianist Weiyin Chen teamed up with the Camerata RCO players from Amsterdam. === SubCulture SubCulture has made a special effort to attract classical audiences. This season the New York Philharmonic will again present three of its Contact! programs of contemporary music at SubCulture, in collaboration with the 92nd Street Y. The place was packed on Saturday night for a program in SubCulture’s second annual PianoFest, a Though it’s rewarding to hear classical music at SubCulture, the proprietors have to tend better to details. The program book had an extensive biography of Ms. Chen, but did not even give the names of the Camerata players. Nor was there any information about the works being presented, not even a list of movements. Ms. Chen ceded the stage to her colleagues on this evening to open the program with Mozart’s Allegro for Clarinet and String Quartet in B flat. This little-heard work is a Then Ms. Chen, joined by a quartet of strings and double bass, played Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 12 in A (K. 414) as a chamber work. The original orchestral version is already intimate, scored for just two oboes, two horns and strings, and it works beautifully as a chamber piece. The hallmarks of Ms. Chen’s performance were the singing quality of her sound and her attentiveness to inner voices and harmonic shadings. This was not the most pristine Mozart playing. Still, I was captivated by its breadth and warmth, and the easy interplay between Ms. Chen and the ensemble. Mendelssohn composed his Concerto for Violin, Piano and Strings as a teenager. You hear hints of Bach and Mozart, strands of Italian opera, the virtuosic piano music of the day and more in this teeming 35-minute piece. The piano and violin share bursts of virtuosic passagework, brilliantly dispatched here by the dynamic violinist Marc Daniel van Biemen and Ms. Chen, at her nimble-fingered best. The second movement is searching and lovely; the finale, a rousing dance. For an encore, Ms. Chen again turned the stage over to the Camerata players, who performed a beguiling arrangement for clarinet and string quintet (with double bass) of the slow movement from Brahms’s Sonata in F minor for Clarinet and Piano. After the concert, many audience members gathered at the bar to have a drink and meet the artists, a SubCulture tradition.