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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
February 13, 2005
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By Michelle Dulak Thomson
Every time I think I've done a roundup of oustanding Bay Area ensembles, I discover that I've omitted someone. (Several "someones," generally; this is such a music-rich environment that it becomes difficult to track them all.) The New Pacific Trio, comprising pianist Sonia Leong, violinist Linda Wang, and cellist Nina Flyer, is one that slipped in under the radar until Sunday's concert at Old First Church. The program was offbeat; the playing was marvelous.
Saint-Saëns' 1892 Second Piano Trio is one of the great almosts. Everything you'd want is in there — good tunes, a spectacular piano part, an array of charming "characteristic pieces" tucked between the "serious" outer movements. The problem is that almost everything in the piece is just a little too long, especially the three inner movements. They are frustrating, because the material is so good that you don't want to get tired of it. The "outer" inner movements — a gentle dance in quintuple time, and a brisker scherzo marked "Grazioso, poco allegro" that could almost be a deracinated Dvorák Slavonic Dance — surround a slow movement with a Rachmaninov-like harmonic tic (the theme taken down a step) that happens too many times for its own good. On the outside, you have big, meaty, serious movements that are also just a little too long. The finale has the almost-obligatory Saint-Saëns fugato, though in this case the subject — an outgrowth of the second theme — is so wild and wacky that your attention is held. (Even despite having been advised from the stage by one of the players that the fugue is there to demonstrate that the finale is serious, because fugues are "academic.").
The performance was about all one could want. Wang and Flyer are uncommonly well-matched players, Flyer with the grittier sound, Wang with a smooth but intense tone that stood up well to Flyer's, and to the lid-full-up piano too. Leong, meanwhile, played the brilliant piano part effortlessly and with a great deal of flair, though perhaps a little too much care not to cover the strings. (I am beginning to suspect that the occasional muddiness in the low register of the piano at Old First Concerts has something to do with the space, the piano, or both.) These were players who knew when to dig in passionately and when to lighten up, and (what is rarer) did both things well.
The Suk Elegie that followed showed the NPT in another light. This was (we were told) an "abridged version"; I think what was meant was that it was an arrangement. The original scoring was violin, cello, string quartet, harp, and harmonium — an ensemble that sounds strange today, but wasn't at all an odd domestic ensemble in cultured European circles ca. 1902, when the piece was written. (A piano trio arrangement was published shortly afterwards.) Here both string players were altogether more sultry than they'd been in the Saint-Saëns, taking their cues from the rich lines and their underlying harmonies.
After intermission came a terrific performance of the Shostakovich Second Trio, one remarkable for exaggerating in all the right places. The opening (with the cello in ferociously-difficult artificial harmonics that I don't think I've heard performed better live), was spellbinding, and Wang's duetting with Flyer had just the right note: not too obviously flesh-and-blood, but standing off a little — as it were, doing a ghost the courtesy of pretending to be one herself. The ensuing Scherzo certainly lacked neither flesh nor blood (nor guts); it's one of those brutal objects-in-six-sharps that Shostakovich favored, inexplicably relieved by a fresh, free tune that emerges a couple times and then gets clubbed into obscurity again. Then comes a passacaglia, full of densely-packed chords, but with a couple of pure triads in there just to make clear where you are in the eight-bar pattern. And then the finale with its ethnic-Jewish tunes, played Sunday with steely clarity. The NPT players couldn't exactly prevent the compositorial tying-the-threads-together at the end of the finale from sounding contrived. (Here's the passacaglia again! And here's the opening theme, only with the violin on the high notes and the cello on the low ones!) But they did make the ending somehow dignified and moving.
(Michelle Dulak Thomson 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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