First of all, to clear up any misunderstanding, the performance given on Sunday afternoon at Christ & St. Stephen's Church on West 69th Street was not a symphonic concert at all but rather a chamber music recital, and a very good one at that. I'm not sure from whence the ensemble, the Cosmopolitan Symphony Orchestra, derived its name but it consisted, at least on Sunday, of only seven musicians - William Hobbs, piano; Eric Grossman, Abigail Kralik, Renee Grossman Matthews, violins; Colette Grossman Abel, viola; and Clara Abel and Nathanael Matthews, cellos. Together they played a full program that featured one well known work by Anton Arensky and two less familiar pieces by Lowell Liebermann and Ernest Chausson.
The recital began with Arensky's Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 35 (1894). Thanks to the variations on a theme by Tchaikovsky - taken from that composer's Sixteen Songs for Children, Op. 54, No. 5 - in the second movement, this is by far Arensky's best known work. He intended it as a memorial to Tchaikovsky, who had died only a few months previously of cholera, and so the work has overall a dark character that is only enhanced by the use of a minor key and by the unusual instrumentation - violin, viola, and two cellos - that emphasizes the lower tonal registers. The somber nature of the work is apparent immediately in the first movement whose opening theme takes as its source a funeral chant from the Russian Orthodox liturgy; the same theme then reappears as a coda at the end of the seven variations in the second movement. And the work's elegiac character is again emphasized in the final movement whose theme is derived from still another liturgical source, the Requiem mass. Even the Tchaikovsky song "Legend" (adapted from the 1857 poem "Roses and Thorns" by Richard Henry Stoddard) that provides the theme upon which the variations are based contains an oblique reference to Jesus's crucifixion and so by extension to the suffering Tchaikovsky endured during his life. Underlying the entire work is a strain of Russian Romanticism that makes it a quite fitting tribute to Tchaikovsky, himself the leading proponent of that school of music.
The next work was Liebermann's Concerto for Violin, Piano and String Quartet, Op. 28 (1989), a piece with which I had previously been unfamiliar. Before this, I had known the composer primarily through his eleven nocturnes for solo piano, a series I hold in the highest esteem. The present work, originally commissioned by the Spoleto Festival, does not possess the neo-Romantic character of the nocturnes but is instead a well thought out piece of modern music that pays particular attention to the solo violin part, played exceptionally well here by Eric Grossman, while the piano and string quartet stand in for orchestra. The music is extremely inventive throughout and occasionally displays an uneasy tension that gives rise to bursts of nervous energy in the violin part, but for all that the work is easily accessible. At the conclusion of Sunday's performance the composer, who had been sitting in the audience, rose to take a brief bow.
After intermission, the program ended with Chausson's Concerto in D major for Violin, Piano and String Quartet, Op. 21 (1889). This was one of the composer's first major successes, and it's easy to understand why. As in Debussy's late chamber works, the concerto seeks to instill a sense of nationalism in French music, at the time heavily under the influence of Wagner, by casting a backward glance to past glories. This is accomplished through the adaptation of Baroque dance forms - a sicilienne in the second movement and a gigue in the fourth - while giving the whole a melodic warmth. If the work has a flaw, it's that it's weighted too heavily on the violin and piano parts and at times becomes almost a dialogue between those two instruments while leaving the quartet with little to do. The concerto was dedicated, as were several other works by Chausson, to the great violinist Eugène Ysaÿe who undertook the solo part at the 1892 premiere in Brussels .
At the conclusion of the recital, I had an opportunity to speak briefly with Mr. Liebermann. Noting the highly distinctive instrumentation used in both the two final pieces, I asked the composer if there were any connection between his work and Chausson's. He answered that at the time of the Spoleto commission, the festival had already programmed the Chausson concerto and had explicitly requested from him a work using the same combination of instruments. Both concertos were in fact performed at the festival with Joshua Bell taking the solo violin part on each and Jean-Yves Thibaudet the piano part. Mr. Liebermann added that he had deliberately timed the piece so that it could be included on a CD recording together with the Chausson. In the end, though, the Chausson was paired with the Ravel Piano Trio, an indication perhaps that the recording company (London) did not want to risk releasing an album comprised of two relatively unknown pieces.
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