San Francisco Classical Voice

Old First Concerts' chamber music series may receive less media attention than various high-budget series dedicated to bringing touring artists to the Bay Area. But it has a way of drawing out the best of local chamber musicians and of attracting the attention of out-of-town performers anxious to work with them. Sunday's string trio recital at the Old First Church, anchored by San Francisco violist Elizabeth Runnicles, saw the Old First synergy at its best.

The prominent young English violinist Daniel Hope, originally scheduled for the whole program, was forced to cancel at short notice due to illness, but his place was ably taken by two other visiting violinists, Esther Hoppe and Ken Aiso. Hoppe appeared in Beethoven's G-major Trio, Op. 9/1, in a program-opening performance that took some time to get up to speed but that in the end was splendid. The first movement made an ambiguous impression — very beautifully and spotlessly played, but a little too beefy in sound, and more than a little too smoothly assured in manner, as though the players were telling a tale whose ending everyone already knows.

In the first place, this is not true for a Beethoven string trio. (Would that it were — chamber-music players know them well, but most listeners, unfortunately, don't.) And in the second place, sailing easily through Beethoven's harmonic and formal shocks blunts their point. There is a lot left to enjoy (Beethoven was by no means as hapless a melody writer as some accounts suggest). But much of the fun is in the unexpected twists of the musical stream, and players who take the shocks lightly aren't giving their audiences all there is.

But the rest of the Beethoven made a different impression. The slow movement — in E major, a key Beethoven seems to have reserved, even then, for a particular mood, a sort of serene intensity — was played with great concentration and exquisite dynamic control.

The scherzo was pert and articulate, though the second trio section (not often performed, because it was absent from the earliest editions and thus from many modern ones) was a little muddy in texture, the intricate viola accompaniment lost between the louder solos of the violin and cello. But the breathless Presto finale was all that it can be — whirling with energy but not in the least mechanical: a giddy, exuberantly human dance. The final rush of the coda deserved the ovation it got.

Hoppe's prominent vibrato and effortlessly projected tone dominated the Beethoven performance, but her colleagues held their own. Runnicles' rich and colorful viola playing is not new to Bay Area audiences. Adrian Brendel's cello playing may well be — at least, it was new to me. The Beethoven showed him to be a master player, technically immaculate, with a gorgeous tone and (more importantly) the sense to articulate as much with the left hand as with the bow, with the imagination to do it well and wisely.

Brendel was tested further by Ravel's Duo Sonata, with its notoriously exacting cello part. He played with confidence and grace, ranging far up the fingerboard with only minimal slips of intonation, and drawing on a huge repertory of tone colors — a whisper here, a startlingly violent snarl there. His partner was the violinist Ken Aiso, born in Tokyo but now resident in England. Aiso is the sort of player whose right-hand technique is so economical that his wrist looks stiff — he moves only as often and as much as he has to. In the Ravel he was disarmingly free and expressive, but also biting when the occasion required it. (Indeed, the only flaw in the performance of the first movement of the Ravel was that Brendel's offbeats were too soft-edged beside Aiso's forthright on-the-beat line.)

The afternoon's most intense musical experience was the first taste of a string-trio-in-progress by the Hungarian composer György Kurtág. Titled Signs, Games, and Messages, the piece draws on Kurtág's works of several decades and is still growing. Some of the movements are for the full string trio, some for individual instruments. The seven-movement selection given by Aiso, Runnicles, and Brendel was a portrait of a brilliant and unusually modest composer.

The pieces were all brief — some under two minutes in length — but each had a musical point and made it promptly. The one chosen to open the set began with the instruments' open strings — a theme that returned (by whose design — Kurtág's? the trio's?) in later movements — but grew more complex over its tiny span. So did a later piece that started as a chorale, at first in pure triads, then increasingly dissonant.

There were two other ensemble movements, one purely pizzicato (like a mild and truncated version of the fourth movement of Bartók's Fourth Quartet), one an inconceivable, terse jumbling-together of abrupt gestures, as though someone had taken a bet that he could sum up Bartók's favorite quartet gestures in the space of 40 seconds.

And then there were three solo movements interspersed among the trios, one for each instrument. A pensive solo for the viola, a skittish, capricious one for the violin — and then, to end, a harrowing cello solo more powerful than anything that had come before. It was nothing more than a series of slow, descending scales, starting from ever-higher notes, played very quietly and without vibrato. But the feeling of concentration — and, in the end, of doom — was almost unbearable. It took several seconds before the audience realized that the piece was over and felt able to applaud.

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

©2000 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved