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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
June 7, 2004
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By David Lawrence
The second annual Menuhin Chamber Music Seminar opened last Friday in Knuth Hall at San Francisco State. This festival, which included master classes and performances by student groups, featured joint recitals by the Jupiter Trio, Cypress Quartet and the Alexander Quartet, plus guest artists, for three consecutive evenings (see also Michelle Dulak's review in this issue of SFCV). San Francisco is of course justly proud of its Menuhin heritage, which included a family estate in the Santa Cruz Mountains near Summit, so the homage to the great violinist is entirely appropriate.
The professional recitals in the series were bursting at the seams with masterpieces of the chamber music repertoire, including two by Mozart, two by Brahms, and one each by Schumann, Shostakovich and Ravel. To that was added a short offering by the largely-unknown Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff. This resulted in some rather strange program-building on Friday, with Schulhoff's light-hearted piece being surrounded by two cornerstones of the 19th century, like a sapling between giant redwoods. Actually, the Schulhoff might have provided an amusing foil for one of the Mozarts; that arrangement would have made a more sensible first half of the opening program.
Born in Prague in 1894, Erwin Schulhoff spent a good deal of his creative life searching for a musical vocabulary that he felt would appropriately reflect his strongly left-leaning politics. That seems like a dubious ambition at best; I mean, was The Second Viennese School "conservative" or "radical?" Trying to apply political labels to art usually gets you into trouble very quickly. In any case, he paid visits to most of the important stylistic movements of the 20th century along the way (including the 12-tone group). An example of the breadth of his meanderings would be the brief song cycle "The Cloud Pump," which is kooky fun in the Dada mode, with a jazzy accompaniment of winds, trumpet and percussion. Anyway, he finally found what he felt to be his true stylistic voice in the late 1930s, as a Stalinist — arguably a "conservative" stance — just in time to be incarcerated and murdered by the Nazis; one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.
Schulhoff's "Five Pieces for String Quartet" are each short dances of various kinds, some cute and some pretty funky, like the opening waltz that's in 3/4 time but written in 4/4, just to be annoying. The most charming is the "Alla Tango Milonga." It's a real tango — you could have danced to it if the aisles were a little wider. Ravel might well have written it, with that wry humor of his. The youthful Cypress Quartet acquitted itself nicely in this music, as Schulhoff appears to be a favorite of theirs. The serious business of the evening started immediately, with the Jupiter Trio's performance of Schumann's Piano Quartet in Eb Major, Opus 47. I'm having a running argument with someone who thinks that Schumann was a greater composer than Brahms, because the former really "invented" the Romantic vocabulary to which Brahms only added his own brand of intellectual rigor. I'm not buying, but I will admit that it's becoming a bad habit to undervalue Schumann. He is often labeled a "miniaturist" — meant as a pejorative — which is both unfair and untrue. A good antidote to negativity about Schumann would be to play through that entire enormous run of piano works, from Opus 1 to Opus 23, and realize that there's not a single page of weak music. It's a monumental achievement. For a well-known work, this quartet is not at all easy to bring off: three of the four movements have major interpretive minefields in them. Embedding the many interludes into the various iterations of the Mendelssohnian scherzo calls for pristine ensemble playing, which is a hallmark of the Jupiter Trio, in this instance ably enhanced by violist Toby Appel. The Andante Cantabile movement dances within inches of the edge of a sentimental abyss, and frankly, most performances fall right in. The Jupiters didn't because, in addition to their many other virtues, they have impeccable taste. And the final movement, in which Schumann puts on his Beethoven mask and surrounds us with dizzying imitative counterpoint, often comes off as just a jumble of sound. This performance was completely articulate — probably the best I've ever heard.
Skipping past Schulhoff, the large arc of the evening was from Schumann to the Brahms Piano Quintet in f minor, Opus 34, which occupied the second half of the program. Brahms is at the pinnacle of his powers in this quintet, which means that it's one of the Olympian peaks of the entire 19th century. A thorough exploration of the merits of this piece would take up the remaining bandwidth on this server. Suffice it to say that it's large, lofty and distinguished in every dimension, including emotionally, and yet there isn't a single moment of ponderousness or excess. If you want to witness a perfect marriage of mind and heart, look no further; this is true mastery at work. And for those who find the formal classicism of Brahms "predictable," at least compared to the Liszt/Wagner school, listen again to the other-worldly introduction to the final movement. As to the performance, the Alexander Quartet produces, by professional standards, a rather muddy sound. And while relaxation is normally a virtue, they're so laid-back that their playing has the look and feel of a read-through at somebody's apartment. I hold no brief for any form of artificial theatricality on the part of musicians, but there's something to be said for communicating a quality of intensity; certainly this piece absolutely demands it. If it looks like you're just going through the motions, the chances are that's how the music is going to sound. Jeremy Menuhin, Yehudi's son, played the immense piano part, and although he seemed lively and attentive, he didn't really make his interpretive presence felt either. Truthfully, when the score is as magnificent as this one, I'm not as bothered by a lackluster performance as other audience members seemed to be (judging from their tepid response). Now, this may be the first time any music reviewer has ever said that, because criticizing performance is normally taken to be the primary task. But my brain tends to fill in whatever nuance, interpretive gesture and expressive content needs to be there, whether the performers provide it or not. I seem to respond almost entirely to what the composer has to say. And I left this concert in awe of the idea that art as glorious as this actually emerged from a member of our poor, flawed species. It's inspiring and hopeful to think that thought, and right now we need all the inspiration we can get.
(David A. Lawrence holds a doctorate from Stanford, and has served on the faculties of Stanford and UCLA.)
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Jupiter Trio
Toby Appel