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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
June 5, 2004
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By Michelle Dulak
A program shared by many ensembles and soloists can't help but prompt listeners into comparing them. The Menuhin Seminar's second concert saw a couple of guest artists and a couple of Bay Area ensembles in close proximity. In a long and varied recital, I think the locals came out ahead.
If any musician stood out all evening long, it was Aglika Angelova, the pianist of the Jupiter Trio. The Mozart piano trios have a somewhat sour reputation among players and audiences — possibly because they don't favor the cello enough, possibly because they aren't quite as intricate, texturally and formally, as the late string chamber music or the late symphonies are. If anyone wanted reminding what magnificent music is in the trios, Saturday's performance ought to have done it. Angelova takes Mozart seriously — seriously enough to have serious fun with it. She would dash into a passage and emerge at its top with elfin delicacy, or play a phrase with apparent severity and then turn to the audience, with fingers and with posture and gaze, and transform the severity into mirth. San Franciscans, you've got a brilliant Mozart pianist among you.
Her partners were fine, if not quite on the same level. Robert Waters' violin playing was unfailingly elegant; I only wished for more answers to Angelova's wit. Cellist Julian Hersh's playing, meanwhile, occasionally suggested that he was a little defensive about the music: "The cello parts in Mozart's trios are so important!" Not that he overbalanced much, but there was a pervasive tendency to overmatch the violin, both in volume and in length of stroke, that got wearisome eventually. But who cares? I'd listen to Mozart playing like Angelova's for hours on end had I the chance.
Toby Appel joined Jeremy Menuhin in the Shostakovich Viola Sonata. This is a piece that honestly can be handled only a couple of ways. You can make it into a dubious sort of show-piece, by playing up the virtuoso elements of the middle movement; or else you can treat it as a deathbed testament. The latter has the force of fact behind it: this was Shostakovich's last work; he knew he was dying when he wrote it; interspersed among the "Moonlight Sonata" bits in the finale is a quotation from the Fourteenth Symphony (a song-cycle for soprano, bass, strings, and percussion whose general theme might be summarized as "all death, all the time"). In other words, you've got the options of exhibiting your chops, or exhibiting your Angst. But you're pretty well obliged to do at least one of the two. Appel didn't. At least, he didn't seem to internalize the bleak landscape of the piece sufficiently to make up for not getting the fourths in tune. Too bad, because the opening couple minutes, at least, boded well: bare pizzicatti, vibratoless tone, and Jeremy Menuhin's unsparing, pitiless piano playing. But from there the viola playing got increasingly glib — not, unfortunately, in the sense of being technically slick, but in the sense of no one particularly caring what was being said.
Appel reappeared at the end of the concert as second viola in the Cypress Quartet's performance of Brahms' second string quintet, Op. 111. I hope it will not be interpreted as an insult if I say that he was a magnificent second violist; in a piece as dense and difficult as that one, that's a high honor. And actually it was the violas that carried that performance, together with cellist Jennifer Kloetzel. The second theme, which is sung by the two violists (the Cypress' Ethan Filner had the leading role here as elsewhere); the trio of the third movement . . . I wished for violinists with the tone and stamina and moxie to match the lower strings. Cecily Ward played her heart out — the quasi-cadenzas in the third movement were marvelous — but she was overpowered by the lower half of her ensemble. The concert opened with Trio D'Anciana, a student ensemble — Ina Mirtcheva, Brendan Conway, and Alicia Ward — playing Paul Schoenfield's Café Music, possibly known elsewhere as "the piece that the Eroica Trio made famous." It's not unpleasant music, but it seems poor debut material for this trio. Conway (the violinist) seemed to be having fun with the material, but Ward (the cellist) sounded ill at ease, while Mirtcheva played skillfully but in a manner that suggested that she would have more fun with better music in hand.
(Michelle Dulak, editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings,
Stagebill, Early Music America, and the New York Times.)
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Cypress Quartet