2016 Chamberfest (Post 5): Schumann and Messiaen

On Saturday afternoon I went to Paul Hall for the last Chamberfest performance I'll be attending this season.  The program again featured only two works, one by Schumann and the other by Messiaen.

The program opened with Schumann's Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 63 (1847) performed by Alissa Mori, violin; Jessica Hong, cello; and Irfan Tengku, piano.  The pre-college musicians were coached by Timothy Eddy and Sylvia Rosenberg.

The Op. 63, written before symptoms of Schumann's mental illness first manifested themselves, is generally considered the composer's strongest attempt in this genre.  It was, however, not his first.  He had already composed a trio in 1842 that he waited until 1850 to publish as his Op. 88 under the title Phantasiestücke.  One reason for his return to the trio form after an interval of five years may have been the fear of having his accomplishments surpassed by those of his wife.  Clara had the year before completed her own trio, the Op. 17, her first and only four-movement work.  Not only had Clara's trio been successful in private performance, but it had also earned the praise of no less a critic than Mendelssohn.  No matter how much Robert loved Clara, and he definitely did, his attitudes toward women were unfortunately those typically held by men in the nineteenth century.  He once wrote to Clara:

"The first year of our marriage you shall forget the artist, you shall live only for yourself and your house and your husband. Just wait and see how I will make you forget the artist—because the wife stands even higher than the artist.  If I only achieve this much—that you have nothing more to do with the public—I will have achieved my greatest aspiration."

Nothing then could have been more galling to Schumann than to have seen his wife, whose success as a concert pianist he already envied, now acclaimed as a composer.  This at a time when he had not yet himself received any significant recognition for his own attempts at composition.  It may have been Schumann's wish to compete that made him take more care with this work than with previous efforts.  Though he completed the work in only ten days (June 6 - June 16), he had in the past worked even more quickly, boasting of having completed his Symphony No. 1 in only four days.  Schumann's hard work paid off.  Mendelssohn hailed the Op. 63 as "the most masterly trio of the present era."  This is not to say the piece is a flawless work.  Schumann's principal problem was in balancing the parts equally.  Not surprisingly, he gave too much weight to the keyboard and used the strings primarily as accompaniment to or foil to the piano.

Considering their young age, the musicians gave a remarkably professional performance.  I was especially impressed by the work of pianist Irfan Tengku.

After intermission, the program concluded with Messiaen's Visions de l’Amen (1943).  The two pianists were Wei Lin Chang and Chi Wei Lo; their coaches were Joel Sachs and Jerome Lowenthal.

Messiaen wrote this piece for two pianos two years after he had been released from the Görlitz P.O.W. camp where he had composed Quatuor pour la fin du temps; the new work's premiere took place in Paris while that city was still occupied by German troops.  Messiaen had by then been appointed professor at the Paris Conservatoire where he had formed an association with Yvonne Loriod, who was later to become his wife, and he wrote the present piece for the two of them to perform together.  An article on Carnegie Hall's website describes the composer's conception of the work:

"Her part, according to his [Messiaen's] note in the published music, has 'the rhythmic difficulties, the bunches of chords, everything concerned with speed, allure, and quality of sound'; while to himself, at the second piano, he allotted 'the principal melody, the thematic elements, everything demanding emotion and power.' The two pianos together become a percussion orchestra, akin to the gamelans of Indonesia, to which the music seems to look also in its frequent moments of pentatonic character."

Messiaen suffered from a form of synesthesia and associated colors with musical keys.  The key of A, in which most of the work is composed, evoked for him the color blue and thereby the heavenly sky above.  In a sense then the work is literally colorful as its moods change rapidly from each of the seven movements to the next.  In the fifth movement the composer recreates the sound of birdcalls in a manner similar to that which he employed in the third movement of the Quatuor.

Even to a non-musician, it was apparent what a difficult piece Visions was to perform.  The precise coordination required of the two pianists could not have been achieved without long hours of practice.  The level of professionalism and virtuosity they both displayed was extraordinary.

The Messiaen is the type of work I most look forward to hearing at Chamberfest.  That piece, together with Ligeti's Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano and Schoenberg's Quartet No. 2 were the works of most interest to me this season.  There are, of course, many other twentieth century works - Hindemith's Kleine Kammermusik and Martinů's La Revue de Cuisine spring to mind - that deserve to be heard as well and that I hope appear on Chamberfest programs in future seasons.  As for works from earlier periods, I missed hearing anything by Beethoven as I had just finished reading Jan Swafford's massive biography of the composer; but I did have an opportunity to hear more of Mendelssohn's chamber works in live performance than at any other one time.  I also had a rare chance to better understand how different composers approached the piano trio genre.  Thanks to fortuitous programming by Juilliard, I heard at consecutive performances the Mendelssohn Trio in C minor, his trio in D minor, Schubert's trio in E flat major, and then Schumann's trio, also in D minor in tribute to Mendelssohn.