San Francisco Classical Voice

For a musician in love with chamber music, the first and strongest pleasure is in speaking through music with other musicians, do-it-yourself. Thursday night's recital at the San Francisco Conservatory, featuring guest pianist Menahem Pressler, with Conservatory faculty and advanced students, was suffused with that delightful feeling.

Pressler, pianist of the Beaux Arts Trio since its formation in 1955, was in town participating in the Conservatory's Chamber Music Masters program, which brings renowned chamber musicians to the school for week-long residencies. To Beethoven's G-major Violin Sonata, Op. 30/3, and Dvorak's A-major Quintet, Op. 81, he brought an enthusiasm for musical dialogue that was a pure pleasure to experience.

The Beethoven opened the program, with violinist Ian Swensen, a Conservatory faculty member. The combination of Beethoven's mercurial music and Swensen's temperament made for a performance often skittish and sometimes downright hectic, but always interesting. Swensen is the kind of player who can barely stay in his chair when he plays sitting down, so physically involved does he become in the music. Here, he played standing up, and it quickly became clear that he had no intention of planting his feet in front of his music stand. He would wander a couple yards forward or back, or walk over to the piano and lean over Pressler's right shoulder, playing all the while. Pressler took it in stride, flashing Swensen an angelic smile as he got off a lightning-quick retort to one of the violinist's more outrageous inflections.

Swensen is also fond of vivid gestures, and at times the succeeding motives in the Beethoven were so abruptly and brilliantly characterized that the thread connecting them threatened to be lost. But this was an exhilarating performance, full of physical and intellectual energy. (With reserves of calm, too, occasionally--the still E-flat slow movement, with its high-lying D-string melody, was touchingly played.)

In the Dvorak, Pressler and Swensen were joined by Conservatory faculty members Paul Hersh (viola) and Jean-Michel Fonteneau (cello), with a Conservatory student, Joseph Meyer, as second violinist. Pressler's genial and unobtrusively elegant playing held together a performance that, left to the string players' instincts, might have been too bold and exuberant for its own good.

The quartet had a preponderance of bright timbres. Swensen's high-energy tone was matched by Meyer, who had no delusions about the second violin part being subservient to the first; when Dvorak tossed him a solo, he took it on with the confident manner of a leader and with a big, bold tone. Paul Hersh's viola sound is bright and reedy, very powerful but sometimes a little raw. Only Fonteneau's suave cello playing struck a mellower note. The interpretation, on the string side, was of a piece with the tonal palette--excitable, impetuous, somewhat prone to over-emphasis.

But Pressler's contribution moderated it, putting on the brakes where needed and introducing a kind of timbral delicacy that the string playing sometimes lacked. Even more than in the sonata, Pressler seemed always to be seeking contact with the players, returning gesture for gesture, amplifying and modifying the strings' inflections and prodding them into dialog. He made eye contact constantly, especially with Fonteneau (whose recital appearances at the Conservatory since his appointment have shown him to be an instinctive chamber musician of the same stripe). The joy Pressler took in conversing with his colleagues through the music was palpable, and it percolated through the performance.

In between the two chamber works came a stunning performance of Ernest Bloch's Concerto Grosso No. 1, played by eighteen Conservatory students with Swensen and faculty cellist Bonnie Hampton. The strings, except for the cellos, played standing, led "from the bow" by the hyperkinetic Swensen. The playing had enormous confidence and tonal heft, but also the most finely honed sense of articulation and acuity of gesture. Special mention should be made of pianist Stephanie Smith, who took on the substantial obbligato piano part, and of a dynamite four-player viola section led by Stephanie Fong, whose lustrous solos were up to the high mark set by her faculty colleagues.

(Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.)

©1999 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved