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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Three Musical
December 11, 2000
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By Jeff Rosenfeld
Saying "goodbye" is always difficult. I can't think of a better reason for letting music say it for us. In Clavion's concert at the Green Room of San Francisco's War Memorial, Monday, December 11, Giacomo Puccini, Maurice Ravel, and Bela Bartók each took their turns saying goodbye in their own eloquently musical ways.
The concert began with two pieces played by Clavion's quartet of strings-Anna Presler and Phyllis Kamrin, violins, Kurt Rohde, viola, Leighton Fong, cello. The opener, Giacomo Puccini's Crisantemi, is a brief (7-8 minute) episode of melodic grace befitting a great opera composer. With its lyrical theme and peaceful conclusion, the work is a self-contained tone poem but could also serve as a yearning prelude to an opera or as a tranquil intermezzo. Not surprisingly, the pliant material from this songful work (and from other short string pieces by Puccini) found its way later into his first great opera, Manon Lescaut.
Clavion played with an intensity that seemed too imposing for this work. Not that the beautifully rendered performance was inappropriate. After all, the flowers of the title are customary in Italian funerals: Puccini wrote this music in one night in 1892 as a memorial to a nobleman. Yet it needn't be so weighty a tribute: it can soar lightly, as an aria. It seems best imagined as a soothing corsage rather than as the dark and severe coat on which it is pinned. Nonetheless, the stillness in the Green Room after the last notes died away testified to the effectiveness of Clavion's performance.
The next piece, Bartók's String Quartet No. 2, Opus 17, is not a "goodbye" in the obvious sense of Puccini's memorial. But it contains a profound musical sense of farewell. The piece is characteristic of the economy with which the mature Bartók presents and molds his music. Thematic elements of the opening are transformed with imaginative variety, as if Bartók had been willing to work with his material until it is thoroughly exhausted. And exhausted the music is, especially after a performance as energetic and virtuosic as Clavion's. In the first movement, the quartet never lost momentum through the myriad tempo and dynamic changes. The players mined the music not only for its obvious power but also for its more elusive intimacy, especially in the solos of first violin Anna Presler. At the center of the quartet is a lively dance that Clavion played with great energy and verve. But even more importantly, the slow finale had an arc of inevitability, eventually reaching an eloquent stillness in the concluding cello pizzicati. Clavion made it clear that Bartók was only then, finally, ready to take leave of the thematic ideas introduced almost a half-hour before. The purely musical farewell seemed as final as Puccini's gesture to his nobleman. After intermission, pianist Eric Zivian joined Presler and Fong for Ravel's Trio in A Minor-yet another musical goodbye. The work is often described as one of Ravel's most perfect creations. Though he had planned it for years, off and on, the usually painstaking Ravel mostly finished it during a furious rush of five weeks in 1914. He was trying to complete his work in order to enlist for World War I. If Ravel's La Valse later proved to be his postwar memorial to the bygone era, then the Trio was how he actually said goodbye to those days. But one needn't read extramusical intentions into the piece. The melodic invention in this work is also developed with inspired economy, as in the Bartók. Eric Zivian opened with an exquisite rendering of the theme. He continued to play with ripe warmth and tenderness and often near-orchestral sonority. Not for him, or the trio as a whole, the precious clarity of sound and sobriety of pulse that many performers use in French music. Instead, Clavion seemed intent on colorful individual expression, in tune with Ravel's own interest in Basque and other folk musics. As a result, the conception wasn't always as cohesive as it could have been--not in strict ensemble sense but rather in details like an inconsistent use of vibrato and rubato as the strings traded off melodic duty. But the reward was a reading of surprising richness and intensity. The sustained, crescendi that shape the piece were perfectly judged; the repetition of the motto of the "Passacaille" (third movement) was hypnotic. And the gradual gathering of force toward the piano's last peroration ended the concert with one long, last goodbye-this one not a wistful "farewell" but instead a sonorous "'til we meet again." (Jeff Rosenfeld is an oboist with the Kensington Symphony, West County Winds, and Pacific Wind Ensemble. He is a freelance science journalist and author of the recent book, Eye of the Storm: Inside the World's Deadliest Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and Blizzards.) ©2000 Jeff Rosenfeld, all rights reserved |
Clavion Ensemble