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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW The Rare and the Great October 28, 2001
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By Heuwell Tircuit
There's a special patina of expectation associated with every concert of the Francesco Trio, a group that has been avoiding clichés for 36 years. The ensemble always manages to come up with refreshing programming in addition to its solid musicality and technical security. This was much in evidence Sunday afternoon at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music as the trio trotted out piano trios by Frank Martin, Fauré, and Schubert (one of his masterpieces).
The large audience in Hellman Hall was treated to Martin's 1925 Trio sur des mélodies populaires irlandaises (Trio on Irish Folk Melodies), Fauré's Trio in D Minor, Op. 120, and Schubert's grand E-flat Major Trio, Op. 100. That meant two rarely encountered works of the early 20th Century — one by the young Martin, the other by the aged Fauré — and the massive Schubert of 1827. Good program!
Martin's Irish romp was new to me, and I doubt many would guess it came from the pen of this distinguished Swiss composer. His trio gives no hint of the soft-core serial style we associate with Martin's mature works, but rather leans on the then-modern harmonic style of French music, that of the more advanced works of Ravel or the more conservative ones of Honegger. In his interesting, quite fresh 20 minutes of music, Martin did not alter the tunes at all, nor attempt to force them into formal development. Yet he avoided the trap of merely repeating them again and again with the occasional change of key. What he did do was to lean on the model of the Italian Baroque trio sonata. The two string instruments (violinist Miwako Watanabe and cellist Bonnie Hampton) were given virtually all of the melodic material, while pianist Nathan Schwartz supported in the background with a kind of continuo accompaniment. The trio was constructed in three movements of the usual fast-slow-fast order. The somber, bardic second movement employs a quasi-passacaglia set of variations in which the basic tune is little altered, the tempo tending to increase. (It opened with a long, stunningly expressive modal solo for cellist Hampton.) And of course, one simply cannot write an Irish finale in other than jig rhythm.
Admittedly, it's a little difficult to think of Fauré or Saint-Saens as 20th-Century composers, even though each lived into the 1920s. They arrived on earth during the age of Rossini, Chopin and Schumann, but then got to experience the early masterpieces of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Bartok, without ever changing stylistic directions. Yet each remained creative, Saint-Saens until 1921, Fauré until 1924. Although Fauré wrote a large amount of chamber music for assorted combinations, he waited until his final years to compose a trio and a string quartet. Those were his last two works, and each is special among his compositions. The three-movement trio brims with warm nobility. Nothing remotely tragic or grieving turns up, which is unusual for a composition in D Minor. The finale, in fact, is relatively light hearted in its utterly genteel way. While the performance of the Fauré was uniformly sensational in every respect — right on the button — the Schubert presented some problems. The musicians presented a somewhat dry-eyed, assertive performance of what is at heart a rather damp piece. I especially missed the kind of hushed dynamics that can add so much magic to this work. It was a good performance, a very good performance in fact, but not a great one. It needed more suggestions of Mozart and a lot less of Beethoven. (Heuwell Tircuit, composer, performer and writer, was chief writer for Gramophone Japan and for 21 years a music reviewer for the SF Chronicle, previously for the Chicago American and Asahi Evening News.) ©2001 Heuwell Tircuit, all rights reserved |
