Shulman, Good Musicians Help Bring Chamber Series to Life

One of the virtues of chamber music is its casual, accepting mobility. Official venues are not required. Living rooms or multipurpose rooms in school will do. And musicians in chamber situations often loosen their professional formality, in the pursuit of a juicy musical dialogue in close quarters.

These qualities are at the center of the chamber music series called In the Music Room, now in its 13th season. Keeping things informal but music-intensive, series director and pianist Daniel Shulman speaks freely between works, as he did Monday night in the Music Hall of Crossroads School in Santa Monica. It’s a flat-sounding but serviceable room, and good musicians bring the space to life, as they did Monday with a program of Schumann, Beethoven and Mozart.

This night, Shulman worked overtime, replacing one of the three planned Schumann ensemble pieces with Schumann’s solo piano work, “Waldszenen” (Forest Scenes), an evocative, nature-minded suite of brief sketches. Other voices joined in on other Schumann turf; on “Fantasiestucke,” for piano and clarinet, the luminous Gary Gray, and Adagio and Allegro for Horn and Piano showcased skilled horn player Jane Zwerneman.

Oboist Joel Timm and bassoonist Michael O’Donovan came aboard to form an empathetic quintet, on Beethoven’s Quintet in E-flat, Opus 16, which waxes Mozartean in its lightness and clarity. The music of Mozart himself came last and worked best. The life-affirming quintet in E-flat, K. 452 found the players on their most sensitively interactive behavior of the evening.