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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
October 16, 2005
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By Michelle Dulak Thomson
The best thing about the San Francisco Symphony's chamber music series remains the Symphony players' devotion to chamber music. I
am not sure how many Symphony patrons have heard the players (apart from the principals) individually. But this series is a way of
doing that, and one that turns up not only interesting instrumental personalities, but also pieces that interest them and that
often aren't much heard.
Ned Rorem's Spring Music, performed Sunday at Davies Symphony Hall by the Navarro Trio, is a good example. The trio was
written for the Beaux Arts Trio and finished in 1990. It's an unusual beast, neither fish nor fowl even as Rorem's own instrumental
music goes (so far as I know it), and so internally diverse that it's difficult not to suspect either a joke or extreme time
pressure on a commission, or perhaps both.
It opens with an "Aubade," a movement consisting of tender, slowish phrases — like hymnody, and harmonized close to Copland's
manner in the opening of Appalachian Spring. (I suspect that Rorem's own disclaimer that the title is just about "the season
of optimism," quoted in the program notes, isn't really meant to survive the coincidence of idiom and title-word.) But at the
cadences of the hymn come tinkling cascades of many notes from the piano, falling like spray from a waterfall. It's a remarkably
beautiful effect. But even this little way into the piece, by the end of the short movement it seems like one that's gone on a
shade too long.
The second ("Toccata") and last ("Presto") movements are very like one another, ferocious and fast, full of torrents of pitches
that tend to group themselves into obsessively repeated rapid cyclings through the same half a dozen or so notes in each part. The
same cycling, slowed to walking speed, happens in one of the central "Fantasia"'s many discursions. That third movement, the
program note warned, takes up about half the time of the entire work. But it goes so many places, and with so many disjunctions
from one section to the next, that when it evaporated into the air ultimately in string harmonics, a large fraction of the audience
thought the piece was over, and applauded.
It's the fourth-movement "Bagatelle," though, that's the real outlier. It's a sweet, innocent little thing that you could imagine Milhaud composing over a spare hour, except that even an unusually mellow Milhaud would likely have thrown in some counterpoint, or an odd "off" note. The commonplace is that such-and-such music "must have wandered into the piece by accident." It's hard to imagine this particular movement ending up where it is exactly by design, unless the aim was producing listeners' whiplash. The Navarro Trio (Symphony players violinist Jeremy Constant and cellist Jill Rachuy Brindel, with pianist Marilyn Thompson), played it with nonchalant grace, and the ferocious and rhapsodic passages of the other movements with confidence and a concentration that bespoke obvious dedication to the score. It was unfortunate, then, that the serene hymn at the very opening of the work found Brindel playing with disconcertingly tentative intonation, adjusting more than half her pitches after hitting them, and sometimes not all that quickly. Rorem was unkind to make the cello and violin play in such close harmony, with the violin low and the cello up in its heights. All the same, that eerie texture, one part genuinely at its ease and one attempting to sound just as placid but with several times as much effort, is surely part of the piece's point. Following the Rorem came Mozart's first "Prussian" Quartet, K. 575, which is a minefield for fledgling or ad hoc quartets if ever there were one. It's not just that the parts are difficult; it's that they have to dovetail with one another in inconvenient places, where the slightest gap is obvious. A line in the first violin part in the finale gets moved to the second, then the viola, then back to the first, and it's all obviously meant to sound like a constant stream of triplets. It is not easy to do that as neatly as violinists Mariko Smiley and Kelly Leon-Pearce and violist Nancy Ellis did it here. Neither are the famous "Prussian" cello parts (designed for Friedrich Wilhelm II) easy. David Goldblatt is an agile cellist, but one with a rather constrained, tight sound, and having three such rich-toned upper players as these put him at a disadvantage in this high-lying music. It was an uneasy match of player and role, and sounded it. The minuet's cello-led Trio was effortful (and graced with a cello high E that Mozart didn't write). And Ellis deferred to Goldblatt in the work's many viola-cello duet passages — the opening of the finale comes to mind, and also the slow movement's reprise — in such a way as to rob the piece of one of its most characteristic colors. The performance as a whole was undoubtedly tightly-wrought, but it seemed somehow wan.
Not so the second half, in which pianist Lars Vogt (in town to play the Grieg Concerto) was joined by violinist Victor Romasevich, violist Wayne Roden, and cellist Lawrence Granger in Brahms's C-minor Piano Quartet, Op. 60. The piece itself has a strange history, having been started when Brahms was in his early twenties, abruptly dropped, and then completed nearly two decades later. Brahms's repeated references to Goethe's suicidal "young Werther" in letters about the piece have to be interpreted with caution. This is, after all, the same man who sent his publisher a note advising him that he would have to publish the forthcoming symphony (the sunny Second, as it turns out) with a black border, because it was so very somber. But there's no joke about the intensity of the third Piano Quartet, which is all the richest and all the most furious of Brahms in a small package. The danger with a piece like this one — one that's basically an unbroken swath of intensity — is that even 35 minutes of unbroken intensity can pall. I have never seen that problem handled as subtly as it was Sunday by Vogt and his Symphony colleagues. The things you just have to lay into were laid into with rare fury. (Roden's double-stops in the first movement's development were possibly the first time anyone not a violist has actually heard that part.) The things you merely want to lay into were treated differently. The first movement's second theme, for example, is one of those Brahms melodies that you just want to sing at the top of your voice the first time you hear it. Vogt had it to himself the first time it appears, and it was unexpectedly gentle, sweet and calm and yet still sinewy (you could hear Vogt relishing the hemiola towards the end). The same went for the opening of the slow third movement, which Brahms wrote in E major for the original, C-sharp-minor version of the Quartet and left there when he moved the rest to C minor. The cello solo at the beginning of the movement is an open temptation to indulgence, but Granger played it with a moving dignity, allowing himself to respond with greater passion when Romasevich's violin joined in many bars later, and subsiding into the greatest delicacy when, at last, Roden's viola also was added. The movement's dynamic heights weren't slighted, but it was the quiet things that made you catch your breath. The end of the movement was miraculous, the sort of playing that is so hushed and so, if you will, contingent that you don't really want to breathe for the moment. Vogt throughout was a bit of a miracle himself. The piano part is murderously difficult, and the easiest way to handle it is probably just to blast through it. Whereas Vogt — lid full up, as it wasn't for the Rorem — was clear and nimble and never underpowered, but also didn't drown out the three strings. Pianists who know the Brahms' Scherzo will know what that means; I can only say that I scarcely hoped to hear it played so well, the odd dropped note notwithstanding. I don't know of many pianists who can play so softly with so much clarity. But there was power too, and power without any obvious physical effort. The final bars of the finale summed up the performance well: the treacherous violin line played plaintively, softly, and with achingly pure intonation; the piano line dwindling into nothing, and then the last strong chord. It was a performance I'll not soon forget.
(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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