Jupiter Players Perform Schubert, Wagner/Liszt and Beethoven

In a program whose theme was "Otherworldly Realms," the Jupiter Players on Monday performed a matinee at Good Shepherd Church that featured the music of Schubert, Wagner and Beethoven.

The program opened with an octet that was actually a transcription of Schubert's final Piano Sonata in B-flat major, D. 960, written during the last months of his life in 1828 but only published posthumously.  The present arrangement - for clarinet, horn, bassoon, string quartet, and double bass - given the title Kammersymphonie, was completed by Heribert Breuer.  The sonata itself is one of the greatest works written for solo piano and in my opinion sounds best in its original form.  Breuer's transcription was well done but did not really work.  The beauty of the music could simply not be as well appreciated when played by eight instruments as when performed on piano alone.

After intermission the program continued with Liszt's transcription of Wagner's Ballade aus dem Fliegenden Holländer, S. 441 (1872).  The opera itself had marked a turning point in Wagner's career.  Der fliegende Holländer was relatively concise and well structured compared to Rienzi, the work which had preceded it, and contained within it many of the themes and motifs the composer was to develop more fully in his later operas.  Based on a satire by Heinrich Heine, the love story of Senta and the Dutchman is a much more intimate setting than those found in the later myth-inspired works and Senta's ballad a more personal expression of love.  Liszt's transcription for piano captures the emotion and pathos of the piece perfectly.  It was played here remarkably well by 17-year old Janice Carissa who already possesses a strong resume and displayed a great deal more talent and self-possession than one would have expected of a performer her age.

The final work on the program was Beethoven's Piano Trio in D Major, Op. 70, No. 1 (1809).  The work was given its nickname the“Ghost” because Beethoven's student Carl Czerny, who was obviously an imaginative soul, believed he saw in the second movement largo a musical representation of Hamlet's father's ghost. Certainly the fact that Beethoven was at the time working on a musical setting for Macbeth and had even gone so far as to copy the movement's opening theme into his sketches for the Witches’ music must have aided Czerny in so astutely discerning the work's Shakespearean source.   Along with the Op. 97, the "Archduke," this is the most famous of the composer's piano trios, and justly so, as much for the bright cheerful music in the outer movements as for the haunted quality of the largo.  Both these elements combine to make this is one of the more explicit expressions of the Romantic ethos that underlay Beethoven's middle period.