At yesterday's matinee at Good Shepherd Church, the Jupiter Players performed an all-Russian program that featured the music of Juon, Arensky and Tchaikovsky, all of whom had at one time or anther been affiliated with the Moscow Conservatory.
The program opened with Juon's Divertimento in C major, Op. 34 (c. 1906) for clarinet and two violas. Although Juon was born in Russia and studied at the Moscow Conservatory, he spent much of his adult life in Germany where he was employed by Joseph Joachim as an instructor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. Rather than compose music in the Russian style, Juon instead favored the romanticism of Brahms and was for that reason known during his lifetime as the "Russian Brahms." It's not quite fair, however, to pigeonhole Juon in this manner. In composing the piece at hand, he showed a great deal more originality than such a sobriquet would indicate. Not only was the divertimento scored for an unusual combination of instruments, but Juon approached it in a singular manner as well. Consisting of four movements - Variations, Serenade, Exotic Intermezzo and Ländler - it did possess a romantic flavor but was quite unlike any Brahms piece I've heard. This even though the opening of the first movement was written in the Hungarian Minor scale which Brahms also made frequent use of in many of his works.
The Juon was followed by Arensky's Piano Trio No. 2 in F minor, Op. 73 (1905?). Arensky, who had been Juon's teacher at the Moscow Conservatory, was a talented enough composer, but the gambling and alcoholism that led to his death at age 44 sometimes makes him seem more like a character from a Dostoevsky novel. If it had not been for these addictions he might have had a much more successful career. As it was, he became friends with Tchaikovsky while a professor at the Moscow Conservatory and produced some excellent chamber music of which the trio is one of the better known examples. Certainly he followed the spirit of Russian romanticism in this piece, but the piano solo that follows the strings' introduction in the second movement is also very reminiscent of Chopin. The final movement is a theme and variations, a device at which Arensky excelled, and the penultimate variation concludes in a dazzling burst of virtuosity. The father-daughter team of violinist Mikhail Kopelman and pianist Elizaveta Kopelman themselves displayed a high level of virtuosity in their interpretation of this piece.
After intermission, the program ended with Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence, Op. 70 (1890). The first thing one must remember about this piece, a string sextet in D minor, is that despite its title it contains no "Italian" melodies. The work was so named because Tchaikovsky began work on the slow movement while composing his opera The Queen of Spades during a visit to Florence. In fact, the last two movements are filled with references to Russian folk music. Still, it is the impassioned second movement adagio cantabile that forms the core of this work. Though the sextet was fully sketched out in only two weeks, the composition did not come easily to Tchaikovsky. In June 1890, he complained in a letter to his brother Modest:
"I'm composing with unbelievable effort. I am hampered not by lack of ideas but by the novelty of the form, for there must be six independent but at the same time homogeneous parts."
As a result, there is a great deal of tension throughout the work as the composer strove to place the indigenous Russian content within the structure of a classical Western format. Perhaps for this reason Tchaikovsky shelved the sextet after its first public performance by the Saint Petersburg Chamber Music Society who had commissioned it and then thoroughly revised the final two movements a year later before submitting the work for publication.
The six string players - Mikhail Kopelman and Emily Daggett-Smith, violins; Cynthia Phelps and Cong Wu, violas; and Christine Lamprea and Zlatomir Fung, cellos - deserve special recognition for their outstanding work on this difficult piece. Though they had only practiced together for a week, one would have thought they had worked together as an ensemble for years.
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