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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
August 9, 2003
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By Robert Commanday
What could be more welcome during a year of terrible surprises than a happy one, blooming out of nowhere, a first-class chamber music festival on the peninsula? The conventional and irrational notion that the public's intelligence checks out during the summer months is once again refuted. And dramatically so in the peninsula region, where the Music@Menlo programs are selling out the small-capacity venues at the Menlo School in Atherton and St. Mark's Episcopal Church of Palo Alto.
Although there will be 11 more performances of six programs through next Monday, the performance of Beethoven's Piano Trio in B-flat, Op. 97 (Archduke) Saturday evening may have made that program the capstone of the festival. Jeffrey Kahane, piano; Philip Setzer, violin; and Colin Carr, cello defined the qualities that make this masterpiece the ultimate piano trio. In the large, the performance affirmed the orchestral nature of the Archduke, its symphonic architecture holding strong as in the developmental working of the first movement's flowing themes, its grand, heroic form turning on a recapitulation as dramatic revelation. The onward, recycling spin of the Scherzo was caught and played up by the players' consistency at each recurrence of a section.
They caught the extraordinary balance of the structure, the largeness overall and of each movement. By the nature of the piano part and his own mastery, Jeffrey Kahane was the leader, establishing and holding the crucial integrity of the tempo relationships and pointing up the mercurial temperament in this music, changes in character set off by sharp accents that he, Carr and Setzer struck off exactly, inflections integral to the motive or theme. Kahane's pianism was elegant, from the grand melody opening the first movement and the brr, brr, brr, of the repeated hummingbird trills to the glowing sonority of the D-major hymn, the theme for the Andante Cantabile variations.
The scherzo was centrally brilliant, expressively diverse, and the finale with its misleading calm breaking into its powerhouse presto, dodging the last cadence, dodging, dodging, pure, outgoing joy. This was a performance that fixed the work deeply on the attentive listener, as pronouncedly as if it were a recording that would replay unbidden in the days to come. Immediately preceding was Mozart's Clarinet Trio in E-flat, K. 498, Kegelstatt (“Bowling Alley”), one of a series of pieces written for performance in a friend's home, with Mozart likely playing the viola part; Anton Stadler, his beloved clarinetist alongside; and Mozart's pupil, the family's daughter, at the keyboard. It is a work of sensitive, expressive, intimate relationships between the instrumental parts. Here, Geraldine Walther was at the viola, playing the broad, arpeggiated accompanying figures sonorously, and, in the final movement, giving a wonderful outpouring to the big solo Mozart saved for himself for the last. The clarinetist was Anthony McGill, associate principal of the Cincinnati Symphony, a master of a delicately shaded tone, exquisite sensitivity and a musicality that flirted constantly with Walther's. Wu Han, co-artistic director (with her husband, the cellist David Finckel), was the pianist, and played handsomely, if the tone was a little full for Mozart, particularly this very personal work. The marriage of viola with clarinet is a sensuous one, a combination picked up by Hummel and Bruch later, but wanting exploration by more composers.
Mozart's Oboe Quartet in F, K. 370 featured Allan Vogel, of Los Angeles, a soloist of major distinction far and wide. He gave this a performance of classical expressivity, with phrasing and lyrical lines bringing out the famous beauty of the work. His associates were Philip Setzer and Geraldine Walther, in refined ensemble, and Colin Carr whose cello playing in this instance was too much of a good thing, unbalancing the group. The opening work might better have been left off, because the St. Lawrence Quartet attacked Haydn's C major String Quartet, Op. 1, No. 6, in a tense, nerved-up manner wiping out any sense of the Haydn's humor in the first movement and lightness of being everywhere else, each member save the violist, bobbing and weaving like prize fighters. The rest of the program put that out of mind, music and performances that happily drove everything else — the state of the state, country — world out of mind. You couldn't hope for more from music.
(Robert P. Commanday, the senior editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)
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Allan Vogel
Anthony McGill
Jeffrey Kahane
