Juilliard Chamber Music: Bruch and Tchaikovsky

Yesterday marked the end of this season's Sunday afternoon chamber music series at Morse Hall.  As usual, programs were not posted in advance, so I took my chances and went to the 1:00 p.m. recital hoping for the best.  It was a lucky choice.  I ended up hearing excellent performances of two great works, one by Max Bruch with which I'd previously been unfamiliar and the other a long time favorite by Tchaikovsky

The program opened with Bruch's Eight Pieces, Op. 83 (1910).  By the time he died in 1920 at age 82 Bruch was the last of the German Romantics and widely celebrated as such.  Unfortunately for his musical legacy, however, one of his best known works, Kol Nidrei, consisted of variations on Jewish themes.  This was enough to have his music banned by the Nazis even though Bruch himself was not of Jewish origin.  His repuation never recovered from the damage done to it during this period and he is now remembered almost solely for his Violin Concerto No. 1, still a staple of the orchestral repertoire.  Exactly how unfair this was to such a talented composer becomes evident when listening to the Eight Pieces.  Originally written for clarinet, viola and piano, the work was later transcribed for other instruments by Bruch himself and at this performance a violin was substituted for the clarinet part.  Bruch was seventy when he wrote the Eight Pieces - he considered them discrete entities rather than movements comprising a single composition - and in their mellow tones and nostalgic sensitivity they are clearly autumnal works very much in the spirit of Brahms's own late clarinet pieces written for Richard Mühlfeld.  And Bruch too had a particular clarinetist in mind when composing them, in this case his son Max Felix whose talent was compard favorably with that of Mühlfeld.  My own favorite among the eight is the fifth, marked "Rumanische Melody," that was included at the suggestion of the Princess zu Wied to whom the entire work was dedicated.  This is an andante in F minor, the only one of the eight to include a traditional folk tune, in which the violin first soars before joining the piano and viola in a melancholy conclusion.

The musicians were Manjie Yang, violin, Chien Tai Wang, viola, and Jiaqi Long, piano; the coach was Jonathan Feldman.

After a brief five-minute intermission, the program closed with a rendition of Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 50 (1881-1882), the only piece that the Russian master composed in this genre.  It was his patron Nadezhda von Meck who convinced him to attempt it.  After first complaining that he could not "endure the combination of piano with violin or cello," Tchaikovsky finally brought the work to a successful conclusion.  But then, rather than dedicating the work to von Meck who had inspired it, Tchaikovsky instead dedicated it to the memory of Nikolai Rubinstein who had died several months before.  This was all the more surprising in that Rubinstein had famously rejected Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 before reconsidering and eventually conducting the work.  Still, Rubinstein had been an early champion of Tchaikovsky's music and had hired him when he was still an unknown to teach at the Moscow Conservatory.

The structure of the trio itself is highly unusual.  It consists of two long movements.  The first, pezzo elegiaco, opens with a cello solo and contains a beautifully lyrical theme and funeral march that could well be considered the epitome of Russian Romanticism.  The second movement is a set of twelve variations and coda that at the end repeats the mournful theme from the first movement.  

The trio was revised extensively after Tchaikovsky returned from Rome where he had written the piece, and it was finally given its public premiere at the Russian Musical Society with Sergei Taneyev playing the piano part. 

The work was performed yesterday by Yujie He, violin, Ana Kim, cello, and Yandi Chen, piano; they were coached by Sylvia Rosenberg and Julian Martin.

The level of musicianship at any Juilliard performance is always extremely high, but even by those standards the playing at yesterday's recital was exceptional.  Both trios were performed with a professionalism that more established ensembles would do well to match.  It was gratifying that these Morse Hall recitals should end on such a high note.