I’ve written it before: When Soovin Kim walks onstage and plays his violin with any ensemble, no matter the size, he and his instrument add gravitas, drama, joy and a range of colors– along with indisputable skill and technique – to the world-class musicians with whom he plays. 

It happened again with the final piece in Chamber Music Northwest’s June 30  “Brandenburg All-Stars” concert at Reed College’s Kaul Auditorium. Felix Mendelssohn’s 39-minute String Quintet in A Major, Op. 18 echoed J.S. Bach’s “washes of color” evoked by the marathon two-part concert of Brandenburg Concertos, as Kim explained in his opening remarks before the concert. The Brandenburgs were performed on June 28 at Kaul and on the following night at the Oregon Bach Festival in Eugene. Kim, who is CMNW’s co-artistic director with pianist and wife Gloria Chien, did not perform in those concerts, but he is still a major player, no doubt about it. 

The four-movement piece allowed the four musicians in the string quintet other than Kim to star: Jessica Lee on second violin, violists Paul Neubauer and Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, and cellist Edward Arron. Each musician is at the top of her or his game, and made the quintet sound as if it were packed with instruments, not just the five on stage. As CMNW’s introductory information noted: “Felix Mendelssohn, the greatest champion of Bach’s music in the 19th century, brought those (Bach’s) rich colors and textures to his own chamber music, particularly in his radiant viola quintets for strings.”

In the quintet’s third movement, the lightning-fast scherzo, Kim, 49, pushed the accelerator even harder. He won the Paganini International Violin Competition when he was 20 years old, decades before his CMNW co-artistic director gig that began in 2020, so he can play fast. It was pretty thrilling, especially when the musicians stopped seamlessly in sync at the end of each movement. Mendelssohn, who dedicated the quintet to his violin teacher Eduard Reitz, dead at 30 years old of tuberculosis in 1832, had a lot to do with reviving Bach’s music in the 19th century, and Reitz inspired Mendelssohn to compose for strings. 

Moving to an earlier piece in the two-hour program with intermission, Fleur Barron, the popular mezzo-soprano who returned for her third CMNW summer, joined four other women musicians to perform Gustav Mahler’s Ruckert-Lieder for Mezzo-Soprano, Violin, Viola, Cello and Piano. The women’s dresses were as bright and stylish as Barron’s ultra-expressive singing. Mahler wrote four of the songs that Barron sang in 1901. He added the fifth (“If You Love for Beauty”) in 1902 to celebrate his affection for his new wife Alma. Last in the program, Barron performed in the darkest and best known among the pieces, “I Am Lost to the World.”

Her full-bodied, ripe mezzo voice, eyebrows up, tone round, smooth and golden, filled the entire room, and the guy sitting next to me began to cry. Barron can move people. Chien often accompanies her, and she and Kim were the first to usher her along her U.S. concert path by inviting her to CMNW three years ago. Chien calls Barron’s voice “velvety, sultry, richly expressive with a dark hue.”

Her voice projects so strongly that it’s a wonder Barron doesn’t spend all of her time singing opera, but she prefers to curate her own diverse projects. Chien thinks of her, too, as “an incredible storyteller,” and Barron won a Grammy this year, her first nomination, for the opera recording Saariaho: Adriana Mater.

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Barron is “one of those rare birds who has carved her own path,” Chien said. ”She is one of the most stunning, charismatic, and versatile artists on stage today. She can sing anything – any genre, in any language – and make it her own. That is truly her strength.”

In the upcoming season, Barron will make her Berlin Philharmonic debut and her New York Philharmonic first appearance under Gustavo Dudamel, alongside multi-range superstar singer Davóne Tines. She’ll be singing an evening-length work by David Lang.

If the Mahler songs seemed out of place at this concert, who cares? When Barron is around, Kim said, you find a time for her to sing. The Oregon Bach Festival, 100 miles south of Portland in Eugene, booked her this summer, and she sang the Mahler songs in a July 1 concert with Chien accompanying her.

The first piece on this concert, Bach’s Trio Sonata from the Musical Offering, BWV 1079, had another exciting bunch on stage with violinist Shunske Sato, Kit Armstrong on harpsichord, Emi Ferguson playing flute, and Edward Arron on cello. Arron was added at the last minute, which made the group grow from trio to quartet. Arron was not listed in the program for the trio because ensemble leader Sato wasn’t sure he wanted a cellist, and when he decided he did, Arron jumped in. After all, the piece is written for a trio. It was a good decision to add him; Arron’s cello grounded the sonata. His day job at CMNW this summer is teaching high-school-age musicians at the Young Artist Institute, so if he were a bit worn-out from that endeavor, you couldn’t tell. Armstrong, Ferguson and Sato are newcomers to the festival this season. They are having little trouble impressing audiences, as they have already done in their remarkable careers.

Sato, who conducted the Brandenburg Concertos June 28 at Kaul, and June 29 at the Bach festival in Eugene, conjured up a Baroque Mick Jagger in the Portland concert, prancing around the stage with his period violin. I could not take my eyes off of him. From 2013 to 2023, he conducted the Netherlands Bach Society and served as its artistic director, succeeding Jos van Veldhoven, OBF’s co-artistic director with Craig Hella Johnson since 2024. Now in his early 40s, Sato displays the energy of a nimble rock star and the expertise of a seasoned maestro and Bach-period director. For this piece, he was seated with his fellow musicians, a bit more reserved than he was in the Brandenburgs.

The four-movement 19-minute sonata that toggled back and forth from slow to fast in the first two movements, and again, from slow to fast in the final two, was a stunning performance and accomplishment by these four musicians, though I imagine they took it in stride, considering their stratospheric levels of skill. Complicated and very difficult, the piece proves Bach reserved much of his intimate and complex music for the best musical artists.

One quibble, which has nothing to do with the calibre of music. All-Stars? Sounds like a sports team or profit-making businesses running for an award. Why such a declasse concert title for such sophisticated music and artists? Maybe CMNW was going for a more inclusive audience, but words matter, too.

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