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FESTIVAL REVIEW
"Mozart and July 28, 2006
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The Art of Contrasts By Robert Commanday
You wouldn't think that Schubert, Dvorák, and Mozart — offered on the Music@Menlo Festival's second program — thought along the same lines. Yet that was the idea you were left with when all was played and done on Friday. Setting aside the chasms that separated them in style, culture, experience, personality, and all else, these composers took a common approach to expression in their art, intensifying dark feelings by playing them against lightness, toying with ambiguity and surprise.
It started off with Schubert, the F-Minor Fantasy, D. 940, for piano four-hands. The hands in this case belonged to the festival codirector, Wu Han, on the primo or upper part, and the indefatigable Jeffrey Kahane in the nether regions. This extraordinary late work received an extraordinary performance, as expected from this pair, both of keen temperament and given to deep, into-the-keyboard attack and hair-trigger rhythmic responsiveness.
The work's concept is advanced: four uninterrupted movements in the overall shape of one sonata-form movement. That design allows the tragic tread of the opening and principal idea — nothing less than Schubert's reiteration of the deep forebodings in his Winterreise song cycle — to be recapitulated in the fourth "movement." The first, ominous thoughts become the last. This is made all the more fateful by the heightening of mood and the bright, lively music in between. It is a Schubertian metaphor for life, compressed into one composition.
The inner texture is almost manic, the energy high, the rhythm as complex as anything Schubert wrote. The contrapuntal animation that goes on in the middle of the piece was, in this performance, not the clearest, but the proper excitement was generated. The crucial transitions, from darkly shadowed to joyful and back again, were exquisitely timed. Dvorák's Piano Trio in E Minor, Op. 90, is nicknamed "Dumky" after a type of folk lament, the dumka. Each of the five movements is based on its own song. The thrust of Dvorák's treatment is to contrast dramatically the anguished or plaintive effect of the dumka with high-spirited dance music and then, by returning to pathos, achieve a similar telling stroke to that of the Schubert, plunging from light into darkness. The temper of the performance in either expressive mode was passionate, as rendered by Wu Han, piano; Ani Kavafian, violin; and David Finckel, cello (and the festival's other codirector). From the first movement, intensity was equally given to the musical expression of grief and of gaiety — as Slavic in idiom as can be — and the crucial transitions were artfully managed. In the second dumka, things heated up considerably. The cello is the lead singer, and Finckel was carried away. He came on strong, but his stage presence was also mannered. That is both unnecessary — he's such a persuasive cellist — and uncollegial. For one thing, he faced out instead of toward the other two, overwhelming Kavafian. She nonetheless performed beautifully, playing fervently in the solo in the fifth and final dumka that ended, like the Schubert, on the melancholy side. With no prejudice to Wu Han's fine playing, balance would have been improved had the concert grand's piano lid been on the short stick instead of open wide. The third movement, based on a dear, ingenuous, little melody, enjoyed a charmed transparency, and the fourth floated on long phrases and rhapsodic impulse.
Jeffrey Kahane and Mozart consumed the balance of the program. The Adagio in B Minor, K. 540 (1788), is a gem that strikes pathos in single, stabbing dissonances — made the more compelling in their instant release and resolution through Kahane's precise style. A Gigue in G, K. 574 (evidently an obeisance to Bach), was the right relief before the D-minor Fantasy, K. 397. With Kahane drawing out its plangency, that Fantasy became a bigger piece than it is generally credited to be. Finally, Mozart's E-flat major Piano Concerto, K. 449, in a brilliant, lucid performance by Kahane, was disarming in its expressiveness and final surprise. He was accompanied by an excellent group: Joseph Silverstein and Kavafian, violins; Finckel, cello; CarlaMaria Rodrigues, viola; and Scott Pingel, bass. The concerto is presumed to have been composed for chamber performance and includes optional oboe and horn parts (not used here), and it thrived as a chamber work for piano and string quintet. (Think Schubert's "Trout" Quintet). Infrequently performed, it was choice to hear, in particular the slow movement's exquisitely simple song line, with its graceful, slow rise-and-fall phrasing and the ornamented variation. The great charm was the last Allegro, where Mozart's genius is in full play, with new ways to surprise at every turn through the unexpected succession of ideas. And, as if to cap the “theme” of this particular program, the finale makes a sudden switch in mood to brightness, a closing with completely new, jocular material. It's a great kick. Nothing up the sleeves; it's all in the contrasts.
(Robert P. Commanday, founding editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle from 1965 to 1993, and before that a conductor and lecturer at UC Berkeley.)
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Jeffrey Kahane
