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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
August 10 & 13, 2004
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By Michelle Dulak Thomson
Among the chief virtues of a festival like Music@Menlo is the opportunity it affords first-rank musicians to prepare works that for
purely practical reasons don't get heard often. The standard string chamber ensembles are piano trio and string quartet; you can
augment both of them in fairly obvious ways — extra strings to the quartet for a string quintet or sextet, an extra viola to
the trio for a piano quartet; a pianist to the string quartet or (more rarely) a violinist and violist to the piano trio for a
piano quintet. But how often do you get a chance to add a soprano comfortable with the Russian language to a piano trio? And how
often is it practical to subtract a violinist from your string quartet while adding an extra cello? A Shostakovich song cycle and
an Arensky quartet, both appearing on the last, Russian program of Music@Menlo (heard 8/13), demonstrate what you can program when
you don't have to worry about that sort of thing. And if the previous, Eastern European program (heard 8/10) didn't venture afield
in the same way, it had the same atmosphere, of great musicians getting to play stuff that the rest of the year they generally
can't, with people having as much fun as they are.
Arensky's Op. 35 "Cello Quartet" is the kind of piece known well to chamber-music nuts, but to hardly anyone else. Which is too
bad, because it's beautiful and also well-designed (the two, alas, can't always be trusted to go together in late-19th-century
Russian chamber music). It has everything, in fact: that quasi-Orthodox-psalm-chant pulsation opening both the outer movements (two
of Tchaikovsky's quartets do the same thing); the great tunes, original or borrowed (the central variation movement takes as its
theme a Tchaikovsky song) or folk (a manic fugato in the finale is on the same Russian folksong Beethoven used in his E-minor
Quartet, Op. 59/2); the richness of texture and sonority. Above all, that. It was good, as it turned out, to have the comparatively
lean violin of Ian Swensen above and the uncommonly rich team of Cynthia Phelps (viola) and Sumire Kudo and Ronald Thomas (cellos)
below. Swensen seemed sometimes overwhelmed by the substrata; but when he had the opportunity, he let off sparks.
Thomas was the cellist, with violinist Jorja Fleezanis, pianist Gilbert Kalish, and soprano Dina Kuznetsova, in Shostakovich's
Seven Romances on Poems of Alexander Blok. Bleak and compelling music, this, very like a small version of that great, grim
song cycle, the Fourteenth Symphony. The conceit of the Blok cycle is that each of the seven songs has a different accompaniment,
first the three instruments singly in turn, then the three possible duos, then all three together for the seventh and last. The
mood ranges from despairing to violent to uneasily tender. The opening movement ("Pesnja Ofelii" (Ophelia's Song)) for soprano and
cello, might almost be a sketch for the despairing fourth song of the Symphony, which for most of its length is also soprano and
cello; and the third of the cycle ("My byli vmeste" (That Troubled Night)), for soprano and violin, is a strange and gentle
precursor of the Symphony's one genuinely warm song, "O Delvig, Delvig," even in the same key, I think.
The wild passages (there is a long and harrowing one in the song accompanied by violin and piano) are the more dramatic, but it's the quiet and spare ones that stick in my memory. That might have something to do with Kuznetsova, whose tenderness and anguish in the quieter songs wrung the heart. The instrumentalists were very fine, Thomas especially. By the end of the Arensky (where he played first cello) it was obvious that he can put out an enormous, dense sound, but it wasn't really clear until the Shostakovich how deftly he can inflect it. That Kuznetsova is a remarkable singer was obvious long before the Shostakovich. She took on the one really unfamiliar part of Tuesday's Eastern European program, three songs from Karol Szymanowski's 1918 Songs of the Infatuated Muezzin — music in that "exotic" Impressionist-plus vein he mined so well, with a few unmistakeable Orientalisms (long ululating melismas, &c.) added by way of verisimilitude. It is rich, heady stuff, intricate and beguiling, especially when sung with Kuznetsova's combination of power and control, and Derek Han's nimble and attentive piano accompaniment.
Kuznetsova was back after intermission with five of Dvorák's Zigeunerlieder, and back again on Friday with two songs each of Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky. Hearing her in five composers' music made her more impressive even than any single performance did. She can do pathos; she can do the lightest folksong; and she can move among a great many musical worlds with apparent effortlessness. All this with a voice that's strong, vibrant, focused, and also capable of fine dynamic inflection. She might have been at her best in the first of the two Tchaikovsky songs, "Ja li v pole da ne travushka byla" (Was I Not a Little Blade of Grass?), the lament of a young woman forced by her parents to marry an old man she does not love, in which Kuznetsova drew her voice tremulously back into herself for the third verse, where the allegories of the first two are explained. (In the very introduction of this song, before the voice enters, there is a harmonic and melodic move that recurs exactly as the climax of the slow movement of the Souvenir de Florence that came just a little later on the same program. I wondered if the song might not have been chosen for that reason, but the notes said nothing about it.) She was not far below that best anywhere. The Rachmaninov songs ("Margaritki" (Daisies) and "K Ney" (To Her)), and the other Tchaikovsky ("Den li tsarit" (Always For Thee)) were magnificent. On Tuesday she was accompanied by Derek Han, who was a fine partner, agile and expressive. Kalish, in the Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky, was even better, somehow playing the piano part to the justly- popular "Daisies" with just a sufficient hint of steel to prevent its getting sappy. I should add that Music@Menlo provided something I haven't seen before: song texts translated line by line, transliterated original right above English, and a line-width space between the latter and the next line so that it's hard to lose your place. So simple, so obvious, so much easier to follow than the side-by-side model that's "industry standard." So brilliant.
Before and after the Szymanowski on Tuesday's program came two more familiar pieces: Smetana's Piano Trio and Bartók's Contrasts for violin, clarinet, and piano. Wu Han was the pianist in the Smetana, with Swensen and cellist Christopher Costanza. Pairing Swensen and Costanza worked very well; on the evidence of this performance, at least, Costanza is a player of Swensen's stripe, with a lean sound, a fast vibrato, and an impetuous temperament. That made for a tempestuous performance of an unsettled and unsettling piece, but no one could deny that it was exciting and brilliantly played. Contrasts was another matter. Jorja Fleezanis, the violinist, was clearly ill at ease technically. The problems of intonation, ensemble, and tone production mounted through the piece; and the third-movement cadenza, which should have been the high point from a violinist's standpoint, she rushed through in a way that suggested less violinistic bravado than a desire to get it over with as soon as possible. It was puzzling and sad, all the more so because her partners (clarinetist Anthony McGill and Derek Han) played so well. McGill, in particular, was almost impossibly suave and sweet when he wasn't plangently busting eardrums in the best klezmer manner. The concert-ending performances of the real standards (Dvorák's Op. 87 E-flat Piano Quartet for the Eastern European program, Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence for the Russian one) were certainly of a quality that gave a weary audience every reason to stay alert. The Dvorák featured Kalish, Fleezanis, Geraldine Walther on viola, and Colin Carr on cello, all playing with terrific intensity of mutual attention and reaction. Bay Area concert-goers will pardonably leap to the conclusion that Walther was the ringleader, and I wouldn't say that they're wrong. Walther played, as she generally does, with the intelligence and technical ease of a master, and the glee of a small child opening Christmas presents. If there were any opportunities for musical fun in the Dvorák that she missed, they escaped me too. (The best was in the Ländler-like third movement, where the violin and viola trade off on one repeated pitch, but in various rhythms. If there's an audible equivalent of a cheeky grin, Walther's bow arm knows it.)
But she had good company. Fleezanis was in such different form from her performance in the Bartók that I wouldn't have thought it was the same player. Her intonation was pure, her sound full and strong. And she blended uncommonly well with Walther. Carr was terrific, a fluent and powerful cellist who nevertheless knew when to hold himself in check, as at the opening of the slow movement (a famously perilous temptation to cellistic histrionics). As for Kalish, I don't think I've ever heard that part played better — with that combination of power without banging, nimble-but-not-mincing articulation, discretion, warmth. The Tchaikovsky three days later was equally strong. (Indeed, industrial-strength, at times — Souvenir de Manhattan, perhaps?) The most striking thing about it was the equality of the principal voices. Attend enough performances of Souvenir de Florence and you find that in almost every case you can tell some way into the slow movement that it's either the first cellist or the first violinist who really wanted to play the piece, and which it is is distressingly obvious. That wasn't true here. Elmar Oliveira (first violin) and David Finckel (first cello) were matched: each equally eloquent, equally easy with his role, equally happy commenting and embroidering on the other's song, or singing himself. Add Walther's alternately biting and caressing viola and you have a powerful crew. The supporting cast were Fleezanis, Phelps, and Kudo, and they were not minded to play second violin/ viola/cello. When everyone was in full fury, it was really something to hear. The fugato in the finale was precisely-controlled mayhem carried off at a length I would hardly have thought possible. But there was delicacy too — some lovely quiet playing, especially in the slow movement — as well as a degree of ensemble I would not expect from an ad hoc ensemble, particularly given Oliveira's rather enigmatic manner of cuing things. What more could you do with this lot of players? Well, what couldn't you? I would very much like to see what Finckel and Wu Han intend for next summer. Whatever it is will probably be worth the year's wait.
(Michelle Dulak Thomson, 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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Dina Kuznetsova
Gilbert Kalish