The Jupiter Symphony Players, in their recital yesterday afternoon at Good Shepherd Church, gave one of their more intriguing performances of the season. Entitled Despite Tyranny, the program featured works by Giacomo Meyerbeer, Adolf Busch, Erwin Schulhoff, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich.
The matinee began with Meyerbeer's Quartetto nel Il crociato in Egitto. So successful was Wagner's campaign against Meyerbeer that, in all the years I've listened to classical music and opera, this is the first time I can ever recall having heard any of Meyerbeer's music performed. What made Wagner's attack in Das Judenthum in der Musik particularly loathsome was that Meyerbeer had generously helped Wagner in the early years of the latter's career, both financially and by arranging for the premieres of his first two operas. And Wagner was not the only one to have expressed bigotry. Schumann too had indulged in a number of anti-Semitic attacks on the more established composer.
Il crociato in Egitto was one of Meyerbeer's earliest successes. With a libretto by Gaetano Rossi (with whom Meyerbeer never worked again, most likely because this was the last of the composer's Italian operas), the work premiered in Venice in 1824 to huge acclaim and established the composer's reputation on an international level. It was the beginning of one of the most successful careers in operatic history. While in many ways innovative - the opera has been seen as a bridge between the work of Rossini and that of the bel canto composers who followed him - it was also something of an anachronism in that it was the last to include a role for castrato and the last to use the piano to accompany recitatives. The present arrangement for obbligato flute, clarinet, violin, viola and cello was completed by Benedetto Carulli and dedicated to Conte Luigi Bertoglio. It was so enjoyable a piece that one might very well wonder if Wagner had not after all been as jealous of Meyerbeer's talent as he was of his success.
Next was Busch's Seven Bagatelles, Op. 53a (n.d.). If any musician deserves to be regarded as a hero, it's certainly the violinist Adolf Busch. In 1933, shortly after Hitler had risen to power in Germany, Busch gave up a successful career in that country and moved to America as a protest against Nazism and all that it stood for. As an article in the Wall Street Journal points out:
"What makes this act so significant is that Mr. Busch was the only well-known non-Jewish German classical musician to emigrate from Germany solely as a matter of principle—and one of a bare handful of non-Jewish European musicians, including Arturo Toscanini and Pablo Casals, who resolved to stop performing there for the same reason."
It was a stand that was to cost the virtuoso musician a great deal. Although he went on, together with his son-in-law Rudolf Serkin, to found the Marlboro Music Festival, he never achieved in America anything like the popularity he had once enjoyed in Europe. Yesterday afternoon's performance was the first opportunity I'd had to hear any of his music. It was difficult, though, to gauge the composer's abilities from these brief works. They had already ended even before one had had a chance to listen closely.
Following this work came Schulhoff's Five Pieces for String Quartet (1923). Schulhoff was one of the more interesting intellectuals to inhabit Europe between the two world wars. A student of both Max Reger and Claude Debussy, he gained recognition early on for his musical talents and, before having been conscripted into the Austrian army in 1914, appeared destined for a successful career. His military service radicalized him, however, and turned him into a fervent Socialist. Once the war had ended, he came under the influence of German Expressionism as well as Dadaism. In the company of Georg Grosz, he began in the 1920's to frequent jazz clubs where he occasionally found employment as a pianist. During this period he also wrote atonal music and corresponded with Alban Berg. None of this, least of all the fact that he was a Jew, endeared him to the Nazis. Schulhoff was arrested in Prague in 1939 and died of tuberculosis in the Wülzberg concentration camp three years later.
The present piece, a bizarre parody of the Baroque dance suite, was playful and fun loving. It consisted of five movements, each of which corresponded to a different dance form - a Viennese waltz, a serenade, a Czech polka, a tango and a tarantella. Schulhoff's Dadaist leanings were very much in evidence in these idiosyncratic pieces of which I thought the tango was the must successful. Fittingly enough, the work was dedicated to Darius Milhaud who shared the composer's love of jazz and whose own music was rather unorthodox.
The recital continued with a performance of Prokofiev's Overture on Hebrew Themes, Op. 34 (1919) for clarinet, string quartet and piano. The composer wrote the work during his not particularly successful American sojourn as a commission from a Russian sextet called the Zimro Ensemble. Prokofiev was handed a booklet containing "Jewish folk songs" whose provenance has never been satisfactorily established, and he worked from that. It's doubtful the composer had any real interest in the project other than the fee he was to be paid. He completed the commission in only a couple of days and afterwards never had anything very good to say about it. In spite of this, the work was well worth hearing. It was vintage Prokofiev and, if not the composer's greatest work, still a fascinating adaptation that showed how adept he was at transforming an unfamiliar source into his own idiom.
After intermission, the program concluded with Shostakovich's Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67 (1944). Like the Prokofiev sextet, this work too contained Jewish themes, most notably in the use of klezmer music in the final movement. But Shostakovich's interest in this material was far more sincere than was Prokofiev's and he later employed Jewish themes in several other compositions as a muted rebuke to the anti-Semitic campaigns instigated by Stalin. (Coincidentally, Shostakovich too possessed a booklet of Jewish folk songs and used it as the source for his 1948 song cycle entitled From Jewish Poetry.) The trio had a posthumous dedication to Ivan Sollertinsky, artistic director of the Leningrad Philharmonic and a close friend of Shostakovich. It was Sollertinsky who on his travels procured for the composer scores by Kurt Weill and Ernst Krenek as well as the uncompleted manuscript of Mahler's Tenth Symphony.
The work itself was a masterpiece and undeniably one of Shostakovich's greatest chamber works. From the opening chords of the dark and brooding first movement, it held the audience spellbound. Especially poignant were the Jewish tunes contained in the final movement. The trio was written while World War II was still raging and news of the Holocaust was only just becoming known. The bleak despairing music contained far more than just a eulogy for a cherished friend; in it could be heard echoes of the anguished cries of those innocent victims who perished at the hands of the Nazis. The work was played extremely well by Alexander Kobrin (piano), Philippe Quint (violin) and David Requiro (cello).
No comments:
Post a Comment