Juilliard Chamberfest: Ravel and Schumann

Every January, the year's first Wednesdays at One performance at Alice Tully Hall is given over to chamber music as part of the school's Chamberfest program.  On this occasion, the one-hour recital featured the music of two radically different composers - Ravel and Schumann.

The program opened with Ravel's Piano Trio (1914).  It was performed by Chelsea Hyojung Kim, violin, Noah Koh, cello, and Ji Na Kim, piano, and coached by Julian Martin and Daniel Phillips.  Although the work was written on the eve of World War I and immediately before Ravel enlisted in the French medical corps, there is no sense of  impending doom in the trio.  Instead, it concerns itself more with Basque folk music as the composer, who was himself of Basque descent on his mother's side, began work on it while also composing a piano concerto, later abandoned, also based on Basque themes.  In the second movement, Ravel referenced a Malaysian form of poetry in which the second and fourth lines of a quatrain are repeated in the first and third lines of the following verse.  In the third movement passacaglia, Ravel looked back to the musical forms of the Baroque period.  For all its eclecticism, however, the work, written in the traditional four movement format, is thoroughly stamped with the composer's distinctive style.

The second and final work on the program was Schumann's Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 44 (1842).  For this piece, the musicians were I-Jung Huang and Rannveig Marta Sarc, violins, Lisa Sung, viola, Clara Abel, cello, and Llewellyn Sanchez-Werner, piano; their coach was Jonathan Feldman. Toward the end of last term, I attended a number of Juilliard chamber music recitals and among the works performed were both Schumann's Quintet and his Piano Quartet, written the same year and in the same key of E-flat major.  Composing works with such similar instrumentation was part of Schumann's normal routine.  When writing music, he would devote himself entirely to one genre and do his best to exhaust its possibilities before moving on to the next.  Thus 1840 had been "the year of the song" while in 1841 Schumann wrote two of his four symphonies.  He was particularly successful in his approach to chamber music.  As the critic Richard Aldrich noted as far back as 1929:

"Schumann’s chamber music of 1842 is in many ways among the most perfect of all the products of his genius; the purest and most powerful in its beauty, the strongest in its form, best balanced in its substance, and best adapted in its technical means and processes to the expression of the composer’s thought."

When I had heard last year the Quartet and Quintet played in such close proximity to one another, I had found it interesting to compare the two works. I discovered that in general the Quintet had a bigger sound that was at times almost symphonic while the Quartet was a more intimate work. There can be no doubt that the Quintet's opening movement, marked allegro brillante, was designed to impress the listener while the funeral march that followed was thoroughly Romantic and at the same time a glance backward toward Beethoven. For the Quintet's end Schumann wrote a vibrant finale that remains among the finest accomplishments. It should also be remembered that this was the first piece by a well known composer to pair the piano with string quartet - an achievement made possible by technical advances in the construction of the fortepiano that allowed its sound to be heard over that of the strings - and Schumann thus deserves credit for having formulated a new musical genre. Although Mendelssohn, filling in for an ailing Clara Schumann at the work's private premiere, made suggestions that led Schumann to revise the work before its public premiere at the Lepzig Gewandhaus (at which Clara did play), the final honors must go to Schumann himself.