The famous James J. Hill House on St. Paul's Summit Avenue, with its thick walls and dark, gloomy aura, seems the perfect place for a murder.
Isn't that Hercule Poirot over there in the drawing room, talking to a gathering of jittery murder suspects? "In exactly one hour, ladies and gentlemen, I will announce which one of you killed Colonel Mustard. Inspector, lock the doors."
Actually, in the years since 1978, when the Minnesota Historical Society acquired Hill's 36,000-square-foot Romanesque-style mansion, with its commanding view of the Mississippi River, the railroad magnate's house has served as home more often to music.
Music, of course, can be murdered if placed in the wrong hands. But this has not been the case at the Hill House, where an excellent ensemble, the Hill House Chamber Players, has held forth for three decades, attracting an ever-larger and ever-more-enthusiastic audience. It fashions programs that lean toward unusual repertoire, often gathered under the rubric of season-long themes, in a series sponsored by the Historical Society and the Schubert Club.
The Players' 30th season, inaugurated Monday night and performed as is customary in the spacious and resonant art gallery of the Hill House, is titled "Behind the Lines: Music and Composers of World War One." Jeffrey Van, the group's guitarist, played two brief works by Enrique Granados, including the familiar Danza Espanola No. 10, giving them just the right kind of rhythmic snap and atmospheric color. (As Van explained, Granados and his wife drowned in the English Channel in 1916 when their ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat.)
Just before intermission, Van joined the other string players — violinists Julie Ayer and Catherine Schubilske, violist Thomas Turner and cellist Tanya Remenikova — in a singularly attractive, folk-tinged work published in 1960 by Argentinian composer Carlos Gaustavino and titled "Jeromita Linares," said to be a portrait of an old Spanish lady.
The gem of the evening was unveiled at the end, Fritz Kreisler's seldom-heard String Quartet in A Minor. Published in 1921 and described by its composer as "my tribute to Vienna," the city of his birth, the work has all the charm and geniality that we associate with Kreisler as composer and violinist. But it has depth and dramatic weight as well, most noticeably in the richly drawn slow movement. It's music that smiles, knowingly.
The performance shared the best qualities of Kreisler's own 1935 recording of the work: luscious tone, flexible phrasing and a spirit of wistful nostalgia that was never cloying.
The Mozart quartet that opened the concert (No. 21 in D) sounded thin and wiry at first but caught its stride, finding an easy sense of flow.
Michael Anthony is a Minneapolis music writer.
