San Francisco Classical Voice

The Master Guild Chamber Music series at Oakland's College of Holy Names opened its new season on Friday with three of the Bay Area's distinguished instrumentalists. Pianist Roy Bogas, violinist Stuart Canin, and cellist Laszlo Varga played two sonatas and a trio, displaying their strengths singly and together.

The Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata Op. 19 shows the reflective side of that composer's temperament. While the piano part is prominent and certainly technically challenging, it does not contain the fireworks found in the famous Second Piano Concerto or the Suite No. 2 for two pianos that immediately preceded its composition. Laszlo Varga has the right degree of emotional warmth and restraint to make the most of the singing melodies given to the cello. Roy Bogas, the ideal partner for him, drew an array of ravishing sounds from the Yamaha grand, always attending to the balance between the instruments.

There must be something about the key of B-flat that caused Beethoven (and Schubert) to choose it for their greatest and most expansive later works. Among these, the "Archduke" Trio, Op. 97, is the Everest of Beethoven's chamber works with piano. Ascending it means settling in for the long haul. But from the tempo Bogas took with the quiet first theme, I realized this was not to be a performance of "heavenly length."

The Allegro Moderato first movement was a little fast for my taste. But though I thought the tempo might settle down after the repeat of the exposition (when the other players enter), the repeat was not taken (as often happens in long programs). This proved disastrous, on several counts. The development section came too soon, making its digressions much less fascinating, because the "settling in" had not taken place. We also didn't get the omitted first ending's three bars, crucial because the sudden crescendo there foreshadows the blazing return of the theme in fortissimo at the end of the movement. If ever there were a mandatory repeat in Beethoven it is this one.

It was astonishing to realize how much the great formal design of a large-scale work such as the "Archduke" or the "Hammerklavier" sonata depends on the proportions of all the movements taken together. In this case, the result went beyond the minutes subtracted from the three-quarters of an hour that it takes to play the entire work. No matter how much pathos went into the slow movement or how witty the scherzo was, this seemed in vain once the character and stature of the first movement were compromised.

What about the repeat in the second movement? It seems everybody feels free to skip it. But surely Beethoven didn't write repeats as a convention, not in a work as late as this one. The Scherzo has astonishing key changes that bear and even require repetition to be understood properly. The E major episode represents the greatest tonal distance from the tonic B-flat and bursts into the middle of a B-flat minor episode. Indeed it is the same music that had moments before been played in D-flat, one of Beethoven's "wrong key" jokes. Does the joke bear retelling? Definitely!

I regret that I did not hear Canin and Bogas play the Mozart Sonata K. 454 that opened the program. From the buzz at intermission, it must have been an exceptional performance. Perhaps it would have provided a clue to a better appreciation of the truncated Beethoven. In any case, the concert proved to a valuable insight into the phenomenon of musical form.

(Jerry Kuderna is a pianist who teaches at Diablo Valley College and is a host (with Sarah Cahill) of the Berkeley TV program, Stop, Look, and Listen.)

©2000 Jerry Kuderna, all rights reserved