San Francisco Classical Voice

March 18, 1999

Thursday night's recital at the San Francisco Conservatory was a rare event--an entire evening of Schumann's late chamber music. The program was the concluding element in a memorial symposium in honor of Dr. Peter Ostwald, a psychiatrist best known to music-lovers as the author of biographical studies of Robert Schumann and Glenn Gould. Dr. Ostwald's widow, Lise Deschamps Ostwald, has given the Conservatory her husband's violin, a valuable seventeenth-century instrument made by Francesco Ruggieri, with the intention of endowing a scholarship fund in his honor.

Given Dr. Ostwald's interest in Schumann, and especially in the composer's struggles with madness, it was appropriate that the program drew entirely on Schumann's very last works, written after his mental instability had essentially put an end to his public career.

Late Schumann is odd stuff, often repetitive and often stiff, but in the right hands, capable of great expressive power. In the wrong hands, the repetition and the stiffness become the primary notes of a music that can't, of itself, offer much to offset them. One is tempted to describe the music as "fragile," except that treating it delicately, circumspectly, is the surest way to do it in. Throw all one's force at it and it thrives. Thursday's recital made the point with a clarity that the players likely didn't intend.

Violinist Stefan Hersh and his father, pianist Paul Hersh, took on the second (D-minor) violin sonata, the former playing Dr. Ostwald's Ruggieri violin. The younger Hersh's instrumental personality is strong, if almost wholly negative. He played with iron control, nearly always with a very slow bow, pressing a dense and even sound out of the instrument. He disdained variety of attack, inflection, vibrato; it was as though these were "cheap" tricks that were beneath him. A few theatrical "bow-flings" were his only concession to drama.

In a few places, the insouciant ease of his technique provided its own sort of flair; the scherzo, with its incisive triplets and (later) doubled notes, had an appealing swagger to it. But the outer movements need more--an impetuous and imperious personality not in the least anxious about "imposing itself" on the music, one determined to wring whatever drama can be got out of the notes. As it was, both movements sounded merely repetitive and strenuous (one was made conscious of how much of the music sits in the middle register of the violin, and how difficult it is to project). The marvelous slow movement began beautifully, with the barest violin pizzicato accompanying the piano's hymn-like theme, but once the violin took the lead the magic was gone. A certain eager immediacy of inflection, a suggestion of human voice, might have made something more out of what appeared here as a rather formulaic set of variations.

The difference a single musical personality can make became clear in the Third (G-minor) Piano Trio, which closed the program. The piece has many of the same weaknesses as the D-minor Sonata (the two were actually written within the same month), but here it sprang vividly alive as the sonata had not. The main difference was violinist Ian Swensen.

A musical personality more different from Stefan Hersh's it is difficult to imagine. Swensen's playing might be criticized as hyperactive, even as clownish, but certainly never as staid. He shaped every line with an actor's delight in inflection. He slithered up and down the fingerboard with a density of portamento that most players wouldn't have dared. (He took technical risks, too; some of those portamenti didn't quite end where he wanted them to.) As for his physical demeanor, Swensen's usually frenetic playing style went right over the edge Thursday. Any syncopation (and this trio is full of them) produced an amazing rhythmic head-wagging, while more than once an emphatic chord got him up out of his chair and on his feet. The next-to-last chord of the piece had him actually standing erect; luckily he managed to regain his seat for the last note.

The performance Swensen led was a near-miracle. It was possible to forget altogether that this is supposed to be awkward and difficult music; features that strike us normally as flaws (like the music's repetitions, or its obsessive fondness for the home key) were spun into rhetorical triumphs. There was no dull moment anywhere. (Actually, there was scarcely a moment of calm either, but that seemed a small price to pay for so much musical richness.)

Julian Hersh, the cellist (Stefan's brother) held his own against Swensen's potentially scene-stealing histrionics, playing with a rich tone that fully balanced the violin, and a fair amount of portamento of his own. And Paul Hersh, who had lain low in the sonata, was a full participant in the drama here. The whoops mingled with the applause afterwards were fully deserved.

Earlier, Lise Deschamps Ostwald herself collaborated with Paul Hersh in a set of four-hand piano pieces titled "Bilder aus Osten" ("Images from the East"). These are six short salon pieces, concise and sharply-etched in character, though none of them particularly suggests "the East." They received an affectionate and enthusiastic, though not always perfectly accurate, performance, driven (by all appearances) from the lower end of the keyboard.

The two pianists added a short work not on the program, an Abendlied ("Evening song") from a set of four-hand pieces "für kleine und grosse Kinder" ( "For children, both big and little") that they had played at Dr. Ostwald's memorial service more than two years before. And here there was no sense of one player dominating the other. The three hands (the treble part is a single melodic line) combined in a vision of utmost tranquillity and peace. It was an apt, and uniquely moving, memorial tribute.

(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