|
CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Music Worth the Wait
March 25, 2001
|
By Jeff Rosenfeld
A concert often feels like a success if the music could bear repeating. Great composers usually leave me wanting more, not desperately looking for a way out. After Sunday's recital by the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson trio at Berkeley's Hertz Hall, I wasn't running for the exit, but I'll admit I had been looking for one at intermission. This reaction exactly reversed my expectations for a program that began with celebrated works by Ludwig van Beethoven and Maurice Ravel and ended with an interminable offering by Pyotr Tchaikovsky.
At nearly 50 minutes, Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio in A Minor is one of the longest chamber works of its kind from the 19th century. Perhaps the great Russian composer's ideas for a trio had been pent up too long. In fact, for many years he had disavowed interest in writing for this instrumental combination. He told one patron that the piano and strings didn't blend well. But that was before he wrote the Second Piano Concerto, which contains an exquisite movement featuring the interplay of solo violin and cello with the piano. Perhaps that movement changed Tchaikovsky's mind: He soon decided to write a trio as a memorial to the great pianist and teacher Nikolai Rubinstein.
The resulting work is an oddity. Most good chamber music features an intimacy between performers, but this trio instead features the intimacy between soloists and audience. The instruments rarely discuss thematic ideas with one another via intricate counterpoint, as in the exemplary trios by Beethoven and Johannes Brahms. Instead, Tchaikovsky has strung together brilliantly melodic passages that feature the instrumentalists, one at a time, playing directly to the listener.
More than half the work is a set of variations in which the composer continually dredges up references to his favorite forms. One variation is a waltz straight out of Swan Lake. There's also a mazurka straight out of Chopin that gives the piano a rare moment in the limelight, and a variation with a dreamy delicacy borrowed from Beethoven's last piano sonata. On Sunday these variations seemed to bring out the soloistic best of each player. Jaime Laredo's tone took on a deep, melancholy richness. Sharon Robinson's cello suddenly found its full-throated opulence. And Joseph Kalichstein launched into the mazurka with surprising exuberance. The playing sounded so heartfelt and spontaneous that Tchaikovsky's endless melodic inventiveness was entirely welcome. The effect was cumulative, like the head rush of unabashed Romanticism that concludes Swan Lake.
This genuine display of natural communicativeness was missing before the intermission. Beethoven's Trio Op. 11 was perhaps a poor selection to open the program. The piece is more attractive in its more familiar form (with clarinet instead of violin). In the less colorful arrangement heard on Sunday, the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson trio found little depth in music of little depth. At his best Beethoven evokes a struggle. Here, the young composer was simply trying to charm us. In Ravel's Trio in A Minor, the performers were superbly polished and assured. But I missed the tension and anxiety of the work, which features daring harmony and exotic color. The delicacy of Kalichstein's fingerwork and the tight ensemble between Laredo and Robinson were certainly welcome, as was the group's mature, controlled pacing of the music. This was a strong performance by a supremely accomplished group, comfortable with one another and with Ravel's music. But most delightful were the rare moments of uncertainty, such as the middle of the third movement, when the piano falls silent after a steadily built climax and the violin and cello alone must regenerate tenderness out of the sudden stillness. Laredo and Robinson here played as if finding their voices for the first time, as if they were making a discovery. At that moment, as in the subsequent rediscovery of Tchaikovsky's endless fount of melody, I could have listened all day. (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.) ©2001 Jeff Rosenfeld, all rights reserved |
