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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Christina Mok, Michael Graham, and Miles Graber July 18, 2006
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A Change of Plans By Heuwell Tircuit
It's not often that I've gone to a hall expecting one thing but finding something completely different. However, that's what occurred last Tuesday at the Noontime Concerts in Old St. Mary's Cathedral. Instead of clarinetist Tom Rose playing Schumann, Weber, and Sir Charles Stanford, the program listed a piano-string trio offering Mozart and Astor Piazzolla. The pleasure turned out to be as great as that which the anticipated clarinet program could have offered.
At first I thought that I'd gotten my dates confused; but no, Rose was unfortunately "very ill" and had to cancel. In stepped violinist Christina Mok, cellist Michael Graham, and pianist Miles Graber to play sterling performances of Mozart's Trio No. 2 in G Major, K. 496, and three concert pieces by Piazzolla: Milonga in D Major for cello and piano, the flashy "Verano Porteño" from his Four Seasons in Buenos Aires for violin and piano, and the slow tango trio Oblivion.
This was clearly not some last-minute, thrown-together program. The precision of ensemble and subtle balances indicate that these three musicians have played these compositions before. No one can just read through such music at sight and with such uniformity of concept, especially that big, tricky Mozart trio of 1786. That piece is almost a concerto for three players minus orchestra. (But then, 1786 was an important year for Mozart. That was when he created his opera The Marriage of Figaro, the piano concertos 23 through 25, and my own favorite Mozart symphony, the "Prague.")
Mozart's three movements followed the expected fast-slow-fast order, but with a few surprises. An uncommonly vivacious finale (even for Mozart) gets off to a rousing start. Then, in the middle, it shifts tempo into a lyrical, semi-Romantic minuet. That section represents what is almost a new movement within the movement, before the return of the opening giddiness. Of course, Mozart had pulled that sort of finale trick on the conservative Viennese before, most recently in his Piano Concerto No. 22, the year before.
Piazzolla's life can generally be divided by two important moves. The first was his migration from his native Argentina to New York in 1924, when he was three-plus years old. The second came when he eventually moved back to Argentina to study with Alberto Ginastera. During his early days, he had played in American dance bands and sometimes jazz groups. Back home, he began a revision of the tango format, working it through the major 20th century advances in harmony and texture. In that sense, Piazzolla accomplished something akin to what Bartók managed for Hungarian folk music. For years dismissed as a mere pops musician, Piazzolla was in fact a seriously inventive composer. Even Stravinsky became an admirer. A milonga is an old Argentinean song genre, usually of romantic leanings, which eventually evolved into the more aggressive tango style. Piazzolla's D-major piece adds liberalities and a touch of nostalgic color à la Fauré. It was almost painfully pretty, as colored by the expressive richness of Graham's performance. "Verano Porteño," on the other hand, is all virtuoso spunk and ginger along with some tongue-in-cheek humor. Piazzolla's Four Seasons in Buenos Aires was inspired by Vivaldi's famous cycle of four concertos. Every so often, Piazzolla will have his violinist break into a brief quotation from one of these. What came of Tuesday's performance was a perpetual-motion display, throwing sparks all over the excellent acoustic in St. Mary's. Mok seemed to relish the Paganini-like flourishes and Piazzolla's fondness for jazzy string slides, tossing them off with ease and virtuoso aplomb.
Oblivion centers in on the sensuality of Piazzolla's idiomatic music, although the tango element barely shows its face. His integration of the three instruments offered a fine blending of timbres, although one couldn't help noticing the exceptional subtlety of pianist Graber. That was a major strength throughout the entire program, absolutely first-rate playing free of exaggeration or banging at the keyboard. He's a pianist concerned with the beauty of piano sound, and bravo for that. On a sad note, it turns out that Old St. Mary's stands in danger of being torn down. Built in 1854, it was the West Coast's first cathedral and even managed to survive the 1906 earthquake. But the city's haughty bureaucrats have decreed that unless it can raise the funds for retrofitting it must be demolished. Better it should be allowed to fall down of its own accord, as is true of all historically important buildings. Oremus! Let us pray!
(Heuwell Tircuit is a composer, performer, and writer who was chief writer for Gramophone Japan and for 21 years a music reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle. He wrote previously for Chicago's American and the Asahi Evening News.)
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Astor Piazzolla
