The ACJW Ensemble performed on Tuesday evening the third of this season's four recitals at Juilliard's Paul Hall. The program featured the works of three modern composers - Heitor Villa-Lobos, Osvaldo Golijov and Dmitri Shostakovich.
The program opened with Villa-Lobos's Trio for Oboe, Clarinet, and Bassoon (1921). As early as 1912 the composer began experimenting with a form of Brazilian folk music known as chôros in which street musicians would improvise on whatever European and African instruments were at hand. In the context of Villa-Lobos's oeuvre, this evolved into a synthesis of European and Afro-Latin rhythms that became the basis of his music's distinctive sound. Whatever its sources, the result was a purely Brazilian artifact that the composer here refined in the present wind trio and would later develop more fully in his Bachianas Brasileiras. Somehow, though, this work lacked the vibrancy that one normally associates with Villa-Lobos's music. While carefully constructed and well performed at this recital, it failed to move this listener.
The next work was Golijov's The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind (1994) for clarinet and string quartet. Perhaps due to the classical arrangement of instruments, this quintet is one of the composer's more accessible works. Lasting a little more than half an hour, the piece takes as its subject Jewish mysticism as embodied in the figure of Isaac, a Kabbalist scholar who lived in Provence in the thirteenth century. Each of the three movements is intended to represent a different language of the Jewish people. As Golijov has commented:
"I hear the prelude and the first movement, the most ancient, in Arameic; the second movement is in Yiddish, the rich and fragile language of a long exile; the third movement and postlude are in sacred Hebrew."
At the heart of the piece is the same klezmer music to which Shostakovich also referred in the finale of his trio, the next piece on the program. But here it has a different meaning. The second movement is based on The Old Klezmer Band, a traditional tune played at Jewish ceremonies that emphasizes the endurance of that people in the face of the adversity they have continually faced through history. This is a lively work that I enjoyed quite a bit more than the few other Golijov pieces I've encountered, probably because it is so much less cerebral and instead operates on an intuitive level as it attempts to capture something of the fulfillment Isaac must have found as he pursued his arcane studies. The piece was performed in almost total darkness with the only illumination the lamps on the performers' music stands. No reason was given for this but it may have been intended to simulate the blindness Isaac experience throughout his life.
After a short intermission, the program concluded with Shostakovich's Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67 (1944). This was the piece I'd been most interested in hearing. The work was conceived as a eulogy both for the composer's close friend Ivan Sollertinsky, who had died of a heart attack at only age 42 during the Soviet evacuation of Novosibirsk, as well as the victims of the Holocaust whose horrific fate was only then coming to light following the liberation of the death camps by the Allied forces. The music itself is fittingly bleak and holds out no hope to the listener. From the cello's strangely dissonant harmonics that open the work to the bitter parody of klezmer music that concludes it, the pervading sense is one of utter despair. Even though at the time of its composition the German forces were in retreat while the Russians were steadily advancing toward victory, there is nowhere to be found any of the jubilation one would expect to hear. It is as if the horrifying experience of World War II had continued too long to allow even the possibility of hope. In the end, this harrowing trio, one of Shostakovich's most powerful and heartfelt chamber works, is a eulogy for everything that existed before the war and that is now lost beyond reclamation. The final movement thus becomes a ritualized dance of death. This sense was captured particularly well by the excellent playing of pianist Shir Semmel.
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