Yesterday evening's performance was the last of the 2015 Chamberfest recitals. It had been a memorable week for anyone with a love of chamber music and I was truly sorry to see the series end. The final recital, this one at Sharp Theater, spanned over a century of musical composition as it featured works by Reich, Bartók and Brahms.
The program opened appropriately enough, considering the composer is an alumnus of Juilliard, with Reich's Quartet (2013) for two vibraphones and two pianos. This was a recent work that only had its American premiere this past October at Zankel Hall. It was an interesting concept to pair this piece with the Bartók sonata that followed, although I'm not sure how deeply Reich was influenced by the earlier work beyond the obvious similarities in instrumentation. It might only have been my own impression, but it seemed as I listened that the piano and percussion parts were not always treated equally. At times, the pianos seemed to recede into the background and used more as accompaniment to the vibraphones that relentlessly propelled the piece forward.
The next work was Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, Sz. 110 (1937). It's a testament to the skill of the Juilliard musicians that such a piece could even be attempted at a "student" recital. This is not only one of the greatest works in the chamber repertoire but also one of the most complex; its performance requires an incredibly high level of virtuosity on the part of both pianists and percussionists to be successful. At one early performance, in fact, six percussionists were needed to play it properly. Here the four musicians - Hanna Kim and Joe Desotelle on percussion, and Randy Ryan and Chris Reynolds on piano - worked seamlessly together to give the work the brilliant performance it deserved.
Bartók was uniquely qualified to conceive such a work. He was himself a great pianist and during his lifetime often more appreciated for his skill at the keyboard than for his abilities as a composer. Few people understood the instrument and its capabilities as well as he did. The present work derives from his realization that the piano is itself a form of percussion instrument, an association he had already exploited in his first two concertos. The problem he faced in writing the sonata was to keep the piano part from being overwhelmed by the percussion. In an article in The Basler National Zeitung shortly before the sonata's premiere, he wrote:
"For some time now, I have been planning to compose a work for piano and percussion. Slowly, however, I have become convinced that one piano does not sufficiently balance the frequently very sharp sounds of the percussion."
It was only through the ingenious use of two pianos that Bartók could achieve the balance he sought. The result was mesmerizing. I had already heard an excellent performance of this work last season given by two Juilliard faculty members, Yoheved Kaplinsky and Ernest Barretta, that helped open my eyes to the extent of Bartók's genius as one of the greatest of twentieth century composers.
After intermission, the program closed with Brahms's Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, Op. 115 (1891). Of all Brahms's chamber works it's this late piece, often described as "autumnal," that's my favorite. It's well known that Brahms had already retired from composing by the time he first heard clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld play and was inspired to write it. The composer took as his model Mozart's own clarinet quintet, the K. 581, which I had coincidentally heard in performance earlier in the week. Brahms followed the Mozart's opus closely enough that the final movement contains a theme and five variations just as does his predecessor's. This enhances the mood of both pieces as the variations, in a sense, "recall" the music that has come immediately before it just as an individual might review the events of his life when approaching death. One senses both Mozart and Brahms were aware that their lives were nearing their ends when composing their respective pieces and this endows both their music with the reflective quality of a backward glance.
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