Yesterday's 1:00 p.m. chamber music recital at Morse Hall was fairly brief, only a about an hour in length, but featured two major works by Beethoven taken from different periods in his career.
The program opened with the Piano Trio in E-flat major, Op. 70, No. 2 (1808). Not nearly as famous as its companion piece, the "Ghost," the No. 2 is nevertheless a major work. At the time he wrote it, Beethoven was at the height of his powers and so confident in his abilities that he no longer worried himself over comparisons to his predecessors. He could instead afford to pay an appreciative tribute in this work to his old teacher Haydn. The trio's opening, for example, in its use of a slow introduction followed by a lively allegro hearkens back to Haydn's Symphony No. 103, the "Drumroll," also in the key of E-flat major, while the double variation in the second movement allegretto mimics the use of that same device in the symphony's second movement andante. But Beethoven then proceeds to dazzle his audience with audacious innovations that demonstrate he owes nothing to anyone. This can best be seen in the recapitulation of the opening movement's first theme, introduced in D-flat major by the cello only to be immediately taken up by the piano in E-flat major, a correction so swift and drastic it seems more a coup d'etat. But it is when comparing the present piece to Haydn's own piano trios that the differences between the two composers can best be appreciated. Although Haydn composed some forty-five trios, many of them of the highest quality, he invariably assigned the most importance to the piano part and used the strings primarily as accompaniment. In so doing, he was following the tradition of the Baroque trio sonata, in which one or two instruments are given prominence as "soloists" while the others, generally harpsichord and cello, are used as continuo. In contrast, Beethoven here gives all three instruments major roles in working out his musical ideas. As a result, this work is necessarily more complex and better balanced than the trios of Haydn. The interaction among the three instruments imbues the trio with greater depths of expression than would otherwise be possible.
The trio was performed by Chener Yuan, violin, Yifei Li, cello, and Jiaxin Min, piano, and was coached by Natasha Brofsky.
After a brief intermission, the program closed with the Violin Sonata No. 6 in A major, Op. 30, No. 1 (1801-1802), This is a generally unassuming piece of music - and is for that very reason the least often performed of the three Op. 30 sonatas - but is all the same noteworthy for its date of composition. All three of the Op. 30 sonatas were completed in the summer of 1802 while Beethoven was residing in Heiligenstadt, then a sleepy village on the outskirts of Vienna. It was here that he penned his famous Testament in which he rejected the notion of suicide and determined instead to continue on as a composer until he had exhausted his creativity. This, of course, is the very essence of Romanticism as the tragic hero embraces his fate and at the same time seeks to overcome it. It also marks the beginning of the composer's middle period in the course of which he would produce only three years later the revolutionary Symphony No. 3, the Eroica. Little of this drama, however, is to be heard in the present violin sonata. In fact, the middle movement adagio is one of the loveliest and most serene Beethoven ever composed. Even more to the point, Beethoven removed the virtuosic rondo with which he had originally intended to conclude the work (he would later use it for the closing of the Sonata No. 9, the "Kreutzer") and inserted in its place a playful set of variations, a form of ending he did not often employ at this point in his career. One has to wonder if he were not perhaps trying to distance himself from the tumult of his personal life by immersing himself in writing a work that was so deliberately low key as this.
The musicians were Rannveig Sarc, violin, and Minjung Jung, piano; they were coached by Laurie Smukler and Jonathan Feldman.
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