Jupiter Players Perform Saint-Saëns, Alkan, Liszt and Schubert

On Monday afternoon, I went to Good Shepherd Church on West 66th Street to hear the Jupiter Players perform their annual Halloween program.  This year, the performance featured appropriately eerie selections by Saint-Saëns, Charles-Valentin Alkan, Liszt and Schubert.

The program opened with Saint-Saëns's Danse macabre, Op. 40 (1874), originally composed for voice and piano and here transcribed for violin and piano.  Using as its text a verse by the Symbolist poet Henri Cazalis, the original piece was an attempt to put to music the medieval superstition of the Dance of Death when on Halloween Death calls the departed from their graves and makes then dance to the tune of his fiddle until at dawn they return to their resting places.  It opens with the note D struck twelve times to mimic the clock striking midnight on the stroke of which Death makes his appearance.  In the spirit of the piece (forgive the pun), Saint-Saëns resorted to a number of devices to create its unearthly effects.  These ranged from the use of a tritone to a direct quote, albeit in a major key, from the Dies Irae.  As a result, the lively music sounds strangely dissonant.

The next piece was Alkan's Marcia funèbre sulla morte d’un Pappagallo ("Funeral March on the Death of a Parrot") (1859) for two oboes, clarinet, bassoon and vocal quartet.  Alkan was a contemporary of Saint-Saëns and Liszt and led a somewhat eccentric lifestyle in Paris during the course of which he moved from being a minor celebrity to a recluse who translated both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.  Though largely forgotten today, he was in his own time both a virtuoso pianist and a composer of note.  The Marcia funèbre is a decidedly bizarre piece, and not just for its title.  At this recital, the winds began playing as the musicians marched in single file from offstage.  It was a fun piece, but one so obscure and unusual that I'm not likely ever to encounter it again.

Following this work came Liszt's Après une lecture du Dante, fantasia quasi sonata (1849), better known simply as the Dante Sonata.  It's a one-movement sonata originally published in 1856 as part of the second volume of the composer's Années de pèlerinage.  The work contains two very different themes, the first of which, that representing the souls of the damned, is very appropriate to the Halloween holiday.  As was the case with Saint-Saëns's Danse macabre, the work makes use of the tritone whose dissonant nature earned it the appellation diabolus in musica in the Middle Ages.  The theme is moreover in the key of D minor, the same Mozart put to such effective use in Don Giovanni, which conveys to the listener a sense of spectral foreboding.

The final work in the program was one of the greatest works in the chamber repertoire, Schubert's String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D. 810 (1824), nicknamed "Death and the Maiden" after the eponymous Schubert lied whose music appears in the quartet's second movement.  This work, of course, transcends mere holiday entertainment.  For one thing, the concept of death, always a theme of deep interest to the Romantics, was much more personal to this composer than to his peers.  He had only four more years to live when he wrote it, and the notion of Death coming to carry him off was very real indeed.  Nowhere else is the repertoire is the farewell to life rendered in so heartbreaking fashion as it is here.  We can clearly hear in it Schubert's despair at having to die at so young an age as the quartet gives voice to the words of his own song.

"Oh! leave me! Prithee, leave me! thou grisly man of bone!

For life is sweet, is pleasant.

Go! leave me now alone!

Go! leave me now alone!"

Death here is not some idle fancy with which to frighten the children but an inevitability from which there is no escape, not for Schubert, not for any of us.  It's this that gives the music the awful power that moves us so deeply.

The Jupiter Players' ensemble members always display a high level of musicianship.  At this recital, they were joined by three superlative guest artists - pianist Drew Petersen, violinist Danbi Um, and violist Cynthia Phelps.  The combination made for one of the best chamber recitals I've heard this season.