On Sunday afternoon I went again to Juilliard's Morse Hall to hear chamber music. On this occasion I found the programs so interesting that I actually stayed for the second recital as well as the first and ended up spending almost four and a half hours at the school before finally calling it a day. In this post I'll describe the first event I attended, the noontime recital, that featured works by Schubert, Strauss, Mieczyslaw Weinberg, and Brahms.
The program opened with Schubert's Fantasie in C major, D. 934 (1828). Written near the end of the composer's brief life, and only published posthumously in 1850, the piece is something of an orphan among Schubert's late works. Even today this piece is not often played and is not generally held in high esteem. Certainly, it was a resounding failure when premiered by violinist Josef Slavík and pianist Carl Maria von Bocklet. As one critic unhappily reported:
"The Fantasie occupied rather too much of the time a Viennese is prepared to devote to pleasures of the mind. The hall emptied gradually, and the writer confesses that he too is unable to say anything about the conclusion of this piece."
This despite the fact that the fantasie is built around a theme and variations taken from one of Schubert's most popular songs, the 1822 Sei mir gegrüβt, that set to music verses by the influential Romantic poet Friedrich Rückert. Part of the problem may have been that Schubert was too self-consciously attempting to create a virtuoso showcase for Slavik whom the composer, rightly or wrongly, regarded as highly accomplished a violinist as Paganini. Whatever the cause, the piece cannot be ranked among Schubert's successes. Even if it did not merit the harsh reception it received at its premiere, it still remains a slight work and somewhat insipid. I personally found it less than engaging.
The violinist on the fantasie was Chener Yuan; his accompanist on the extremely demanding piano part was Jiaxin Min. They were coached by Jerome Lowenthal and Joel Smirnoff.
The next work was Strauss's Violin Sonata in E-flat major, Op. 18 (1887-1888). This was one of the composer's youthful efforts and his last real attempt at chamber music before coming fully under the spell of Liszt and Wagner and embarking on his series of tone poems. Already in 1884 he had met the composer Alexander Ritter who was related to Wagner by marriage and who proved a decisive influence on Strauss. It was thanks to Ritter's guidance that Strauss began composing Don Juan in 1888 almost immediately after having finished work on the violin sonata. Indeed, there are already intimations of the tone poems' heroic stance in the sonata's rousing conclusion. There are other innovative touches in the music, particularly in the second movement "Improvisation" that is anything but. Here the tender andante cantabile displays a restrained passion that may have had something to do with Strauss's infatuation with Pauline de Ahna, the soprano whom he was later to marry.
Violinist Wei Zhu and pianist Yilun Xu gave a particularly strong performance of the sonata; they had been coached by Daniel Phillips and Matti Raekallio.
After a brief intermission, the program resumed with a performance of Mieczyslaw Weinberg's Trio for Piano, Violin, and Cello, Op. 24 (1945). This was a true masterpiece of startling originality by a composer whose works deserve to be heard more often. It was for me the highlight of the two recitals I attended.
This was not the first time I had heard the piece. Last year, I attended a Juilliard faculty recital at which the trio was performed by violinist Laurie Smukler, cellist Joel Krosnick and pianist Qing Jiang. On that occasion, Mr. Krosnick briefly addressed the audience regarding the composer's life and work. Although Weinberg is now considered a major Soviet composer, his life was far from easy - his parents and sister were killed in the Holocaust, his father-in-law Solomon Mikhoels was murdered by Stalin, and he himself was arrested for his alleged involvement in the "Doctors' plot." Even though Weinberg spent most of his career laboring in obscurity, a victim of Stalin's anti-Semitism, he was a prolific composer whose works were championed by his close friend Shostakovich, a mentor who exerted a great deal of influence on the development of Weinberg's style.
The present four-movement trio was a highly dramatic work. It veered without pause from the mournful larghetto that closed the first movement to the pounding rhythms of the tocatta that opened the second. Perhaps the finest passage was the third movement Poem in which was distilled, or so at least it seemed, all the suffering Weinberg had experienced during his lifetime. Throughout the work, great weight was given to the strings while the piano remained silent for comparatively long intervals.
The final work on the program was another trio, Brahms's Piano Trio No. 3 in C minor, Op. 101 (1886). This is a late piece invariably described by critics as "terse" or "compact," but that's actually an understatment. It is, in fact, so brusque that, despite a few charming touches here and there, it is overall almost completely lacking in charm. Instead, it pushes relentlessly forward as if Brahms were determined to thrust his musical ideas upon the listener. And this was not a peculiarity of Sunday's performance. I have a 1986 recording by the Beaux Arts Trio, and the same qualities are present there as well, if not more so. The second movement scherzo that so delighted Clara Schumann is over almost before it begins (the critic Donald Francis Tovey aptly described the movement as a piece that "hurries by, like a frightened child"), and even the third movment andante grazioso seems rushed rather than expansive as one would normally expect. Brevity has its merits, of course, but the trio nevertheless struck me as unnaturally forced, a dry exposition rather than a pleasant Romantic interlude.
The musicians were Xingyu Li, violin, Drake Driscoll, cello, and Carmen Knoll, piano; they were coached by Daniel Phillips and Noam Sivan.
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