Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Juilliard Chamber Music: Beethoven, Arensky, Mozart and Smetana

On Sunday afternoon I went to Juilliard's Morse Hall to hear one of the four recitals given that day.  I hadn't known the program in advance and was happily surprised to find so many interesting works were to be performed.

The recital began with Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 7 in C minor, Op. 30, No.2 (1801-1802).   The violinist was Christine Wu and the pianist Rixiang Huang; their coaches were Julian Martin and Joel Smirnoff.  I had only just heard this same sonata performed a week before at another Juilliard recital and have already posted my thoughts on the music.  As I listened a second time I was once again impressed with the restless energy of the piano part.  It seemed at times in the opening movement that Beethoven could barely hold himself in check as the piano drove relentlessly forward.

The next work was Anton Arensky's Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Op. 32 (1894).  It was performed by Wei Zhu, violin, Jonathan Lien, cello, and Yilun Xu, piano; they were coached by Lara Lev and Jerome Lowenthal.  The Arensky chamber work that's most often performed is the String Quartet No. 2, Op. 35, made famous by the Tchaikovsky variations in the second movement; but the present trio reveals Arensky as a talented composer whose other chamber pieces also deserve a hearing.  Like the quartet, the trio is steeped in Russian Romanticism, an influence made all the more apparent by the elegiac character of both pieces.  While the quartet was a memorial to Tchaikovsky, the trio was dedicated to the memory of Karl Davydov, a friend of both Arensky and Tchaikovsky and a noted cello virtuoso, a fact that may account for the prominence given the cello part throughout the work.  Despite its  elegiac character, however, this is not by any means a dark work.  It contains several beautiful melodies - one haunting theme given the piano in the third movement seems almost a nursery tune - and the scherzo returns to its original meaning of a lighthearted joke with playful outbursts that contrast strongly with the slow movement that follows.

After a brief intermission, the recital resumed with a performance of Mozart's Quintet for Piano and Winds in E-flat major, K. 452 (1784).  The musicians were Lucian Avalon, oboe, Ning Zhang, clarinet, Soo Yeon Lee, bassoon, Lee Cyphers, horn, and Jun Hwi Cho, piano; the coaches were William Short and Matti Raekallio.  The work is famous on two counts - first for having been the inspiration for Beethoven's Op. 16 that used the same key and instrumentation and secondly for having been, in the composer's own words to his father, "the best thing I have so far written in my life."  One has to take this description with a grain of salt.  After all, no matter how highly he regarded the work, Mozart never again wrote for this combination of instruments.  While the quintet is certainly pleasant to hear and very competently written, it is really a divertimento, even if of the highest quality.  If anything, it is even a bit off balance in the heavy weight given the piano part.  This is understandable, however, as Mozart himself played the piano part at a public concert only two days after the piece had been completed.

The program closed with Bedřich Smetana's String Quartet No. 1 in E minor (1876) titled "From My Life."  The work was performed by In Ae Lee and Yutsuki Beppu, violins, Erin Pitts, viola, and Ayoun Alexandra Kim, cello; the four were coached by Natasha Brofsky and Joseph Lin.  This was actually the most intriguing piece performed on Sunday afternoon.  Smetana's works, with the exception of the Die Moldau section from Má vlast, are rarely performed today even though his operas were held in high regard by such conductors as his fellow Bohemian Mahler.  (Like Mahler, Smetana had had a troubled career as a conductor during which he was persecuted unmercifully.)  Certainly Smetana's Piano Trio in G minor, written after the death of his eldest daughter Bedriska, is one of the most moving works in the chamber repertoire.  The present quartet, composed some twenty years later, is no less personal.  By the time he came to write it Smetana was suffering from the approach of total deafness, the worst affliction that can befall a composer, but in spite of this he managed to somehow continue composing.  The quartet reflects these tribulations in a thoroughly Romantic manner that is deliberately autobiographical to the extent that Smetana described the work as a "tone picture of my life."  The most moving section is the finale.  Smetana wrote: "The long, insistent note in the finale...is the fateful ringing in my ears of the high-pitched tones which, in 1874, announced the beginning of my deafness."

No comments:

Post a Comment