We’ve been drowning in music and suddenly. An eerie calm. The Santa Fe Desert Chorale fell silent after its final performance of Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil on Aug. 18, and Santa Fe Opera concluded its season on Aug. 25 with a final goround of Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, an audience-pleasing success in a summer that reached its operatic pinnacle with Rossini’s Maometto II. The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival wrapped things up on Aug. 20, saving the strongest ensemble on its roster to grace its final summer concerts.
That ensemble was the Tokyo String Quartet, which was joined by pianist Jeremy Denk on Aug. 19 for Elgar’s Piano Quintet, and by cellist Lynn Harrell on Aug. 20 for Schubert’s C-Major String Quintet, both concerts taking place at the Lensic Performing Arts Center. (I regret that a scheduling conflict prevented me from hearing the Tokyo foursome on their own, playing a Haydn quartet on Aug.
16.) A greatly respected ensemble of international caliber, the Tokyo was established in 1969 at the Juilliard School, where its four original members, all Japanese, had traveled to work with the members of the Juilliard String Quartet. It quickly garnered important performance awards, and these helped launch an impressive career of performing, teaching (principally at the Yale School of Music, where it has been quartet in residence since 1976), and recording (with more than 40 releases on numerous labels). The group has announced that the upcoming season will be its last, and that it will play its farewell concert on July 6, 2013, in the Music Shed of Yale’s Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, a stage it has occupied as a regular presence.
Kazuhide Isomura, one of the wisest violists in all of chamber music, is the only original member still with the group, although second violinist Kikuei Ikeda is also a long-timer, having served since 1974; British cellist Clive Greensmith joined the ensemble in 1999, and Canadian first violinist Martin Beaver is the newcomer, having arrived only in 2002. The foursome are noted for a tone at once burnished and clear, a sound they draw from a set of Stradivari instruments that was once owned by Paganini. This particular viola was the instrument that inspired Paganini to commission Harold in Italy from Berlioz, and the cello had been previously owned by the Mendelssohn family. The four Strads were purchased in the 1940s for use by Henri Temianka’s legendary Paganini Quartet, and in 1994 they were acquired by the Nippon Music Foundation, which provides them to the Tokyo Quartet. The chamber music community is watching with interest to see where they land after the Tokyo disbands. When the group began Elgar’s Piano Quintet with pianist Denk after intermission on Aug. 19, it was obvious within a bar or two that their performance would be impressive.
The string players and the pianist all drew from a broad tonal palette, displaying immaculate technique at every turn and infusing the interpretation with imaginative touches that enlivened their long-spanning trajectories. I am not always a fan of Elgar’s music. His symphonies and oratorios can become overloaded and tedious, but chamber music — of which he wrote little — forced him to avoid some of his native excesses, to his benefit. The late Piano Quintet (from 1918-1919) is an odd piece, but it is one of my favorite items in his catalog.
Although it relates no descriptive program, its evocative music sometimes alludes to specific images, particularly (we know from historical sources) a landscape in West Sussex where a grove of gnarled trees was said to be the transformed remnant of an ancient coven of impious Spanish monks. This leads to a curious musical confrontation in the first movement, where “haunted” music rubs elbows with kitschy dance-hall strains of an ostensibly Spanish mien — all given a balanced touch here, the music’s irony left intact rather than torpedoed by over-enunciation. The heart of the piece, however, is its lengthy slow movement, a rival to the more famous corresponding expanse of the composer’s Cello Concerto. Melancholy infused this interpretation of the Adagio, but also a profound sense of nobility. The entire performance stood as a standard for what chamber-music playing aspires to: faultless individual techniques built into a communal style that is greater than the sum of its parts and that is enriched by the refinement of options proposed by all the participants. It’s as easy as that. That description did not come to mind during the concert’s first half, which featured Zdeněk Fibich’s Quintet for Violin (Helen Nightengale), Clarinet (Todd Levy), Horn (William VerMeulen), Cello ( Joseph Johnson), and Piano (Anne- Marie McDermott).
One of the leading Czech composers of his time, Fibich (1850-1900) produced this unusually scored work in 1893, putting much effort into saying little, though with a degree of technical aplomb. The program notes suggested that it encodes some erotic adventures from his private life; I hope they were more interesting in person than in their translation to tones.
One of the work’s principal impediments was its texture; by emphasizing the middle range of both clarinet and horn, and also including a cello in the lineup, Fibich created a recipe for musical mud. From where I was seated, on the extreme right-hand aisle a row back from the stage, the horn was overpowering and the clarinet nearly as much so, even though I was effectively seated behind them.
The greater challenge to the performance, however, came from violinist Nightengale, whose technical capacities simply did not match those of her colleagues, who were not in a position to conceal her nasal, inexpressive tone and irregular intonation. Similar, though less extreme, disparity also inhabited the festival’s concluding program, an all-Schubert affair on Aug. The first half was given over to the B-flat-Major Piano Trio, in which individual players — certainly pianist Denk — had interesting points to make but the ensemble as a whole failed to coalesce into a like-minded entity. Violinist Benny Kim seemed the least involved, and cellist Harrell (who is married to Nightengale) proposed a couple of insistently stretched transitional phrases but otherwise kept a low profile.
The second half, however, came alive through the attentiveness of the Tokyo Quartet, ably assisted by Harrell in the Schubert Quintet. Again the Tokyos clarified the difference between fair chamber playing and superb chamber playing through details like the precisely expressive vibrato coordinated among the ensemble, the shared subtlety of articulation, and the elegance of downward portamentos perfectly synchronized by first and second violins playing in harmony. Harrell’s tone was not quite from the same sound-world as that of the Tokyo four, sometimes coming across as loose and rubbery in attacks. The first movement was energized by phrases built from tension and arrival, the second movement was as supernal as one might wish (and the group tucked it in gently at the end), the third leapt with the abandon of a joyous hunting party, and the fourth brought the festival’s season to a triumphant close.
Several people have asked me when Pasatiempo will be running reviews of concerts that featured the festival’s artist in residence Alan Gilbert. We will not be reviewing them. I maintain a longstanding professional involvement with the New York Philharmonic, which Gilbert leads as music director, and I would not think it appropriate to review a concert that features a colleague or a member of a colleague’s family. Elsewhere in the news, festival regulars may be worried about the British composer and conductor Oliver Knussen, who canceled his much anticipated appearances here July 27 through July 30 because of a health crisis — according to the festival, a severe bronchial infection, serious complications from medications he was taking on his doctor’s orders, and gout in the left foot, which rendered him bed-ridden in early July and then also developed in his right foot. Modern medicine worked its magic, and music-lovers may breath easy. 5, Knussen was in Redding, Connecticut, touring the home of Charles Ives, which was threatened by an imminent real-estate deal but, in the wake of the ensuing publicity, seems to have avoided its demise, at least for the time being.
Back we come to New Mexico, and specifically to the northern edge, where on Aug. 21 we caught a charming concert presented in Raton by Music From Angel Fire. The venue was the historic Shuler Theater, opened in 1915 and refreshed through the efforts of historic preservationists beginning in the 1960s. Raton may not be a big draw, but visiting this gem merits a detour.
The auditorium is decked out in grand neo-Renaissance style, largely in red, gold, and deep blue, with lots of decorative medallions. Its proscenium boasts its original fire-curtain, sporting Native American motifs and a motto about the Palisades of Cimarron Canyon (a nearby natural wonder), and the stage is backed by an enormous drop depicting an Italian landscape complete with a villa, an arcade, and palm trees. The theater’s capacity of 450 ensures an intimate experience for chamber music. Violinist Ida Kavafian, Music From Angel Fire’s artistic director, also teaches at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and her festival accordingly serves as a showcase for Curtis students. The performing forces for this concert were split between them and more seasoned pros.
After a delightful Concerto for Four Violins by Telemann, four Curtis students, styled as the Manet String Quartet, offered Ravel’s String Quartet in an accomplished reading. The four musicians sound individually like young players, yet they had already achieved a comfort level as an ensemble and paid attention to details that many more veteran foursomes allow to slip past. Experienced quartets sometimes go on autopilot with the Ravel Quartet, a work whose glossy surface can invite inattentiveness through overexposure. From the Manet String Quartet, it all sounded like an exciting discovery. It may have been for much of the audience, too. Soprani accordion serial numbers. Listeners applauded enthusiastically after each movement of this and of the ensuing work, Tchaikovsky’s string sextet “Souvenir de Florence.” That is not standard concert deportment, to be sure, but it betokened honest appreciation and enthusiasm from the welcoming audience in Raton.
Franck Piano Quintet
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Applause also punctuated the movements of Debussy’s Violin Sonata, played winningly the following night—the composer’s 150th birthday — at the Angel Fire Community Center by Ani Kavafian (Ida’s sister) and pianist Anne-Marie McDermott. Here the audience seemed largely Texan: vacation-home folks escaping the Dallas heat but carrying much of their Lone Star ways with them.
That includes, I surmise, an indefatigable hunger for speeches, and there was a lot, lot, lot of talking from the stage on Aug. 22, all of it meeting with the politest applause you could ever hope for. The news of the night was the premiere of Rain Shadow, by composer in residence Steven Stucky, a set of four movements for piano quartet inspired by specific artworks by Andy Goldsworthy, which were helpfully depicted on a program insert.
The composition, which runs about 15 minutes, was entrusted to the Opus One ensemble, which tendered a sympathetic, committed interpretation. Much of the piece underscores contrasts between the piano and the violin, viola, and cello, with the strings working largely as a unit, frequently intoning their unpredictable harmonies in homophonic rhythms. In the first movement, the strings strike a somber pose compared to the piano’s glittering arpeggios, and in the third they shimmer icily in sustained lines against the chattering of the piano. Structures are easily discerned; in the second movement the music rises gradually from very low notes to high ones and then starts back again. Rain Shadow is big on clarity, easy to follow, and attractive to the ear, even letting loose (near the end) a big ol’ Romantic theme that wouldn’t be out of place in a cinematic epic set in outer space. To conclude the program, violinist Kim assisted Opus One in the D-Minor Piano Quintet of the British composer Frank Bridge, a lush piece composed in 1904-1905 and revised substantially in 1912.
List Of Piano Quintets
The program note maintained that “the revised Quintet straddles two sides of Frank Bridge’s musical aesthetic — a romanticism that owes much to Brahms and considerable intimations of the composer’s later, more austere style that was to dominate his music after World War II.” I suppose his post-World War II compositions qualify as austere indeed, given that he died in 1941; but in any case I didn’t sense much in the way of austerity in either the piece or the generous, warm-hearted performance. The first and third movements were packed with a properly British sort of passionate outpouring, some of it suggesting salon style, some of it Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo. The slow middle movement plumbed similar expressive territory to the analogous section of Elgar’s Piano Quintet. Bridge got there first by a few years, but I think Elgar got there better.