Friday 24 July 2015

Festival of the Sound 2015 # 6: The Thursday Musical Buffet

Every year, the Festival manages to throw in a couple of days where there is no particular theme except for "Let's throw together a whole pile of pieces that we just feel like playing."  Thursday of the first week was it.  And within that Thursday, the first afternoon concert was really a musical buffet.  Under the loose title Music for Friends we got five different works by five very different composers shared around six musicians!

Haydn's Trio No. 1 in C Major for flute, clarinet, and cello was completely unknown to me.  But it definitely was Haydn and no other composer, readily identified by its genial, cheerful air.  Suzanne Shulman, James Campbell, and Rolf Gjelsten did the honours with the requisite wit and style.

Next up was a Duo for viola, cello and two obbligato eyeglasses by Beethoven.  No word of a lie, that is what he actually called it!  The "joke" in this case was the composer's thought that the players would need the eyeglasses to puzzle out all the complexities of the score.  To me it did not come out sounding especially complex, so I think perhaps Beethoven was pulling someone's chain with that title, in more ways than one.  Definitely fun to hear, though, with Ron Ephrat and Rolf Gjelsten sharing the musical entertainment as well as the funny business with eyeglasses beforehand.

Then we came to Three Pieces for Clarinet, Viola and Piano, Op. 83 by Max Bruch.  These comprised two slow movements, the latter a hauntingly beautiful Nachtgesang ("Night Song"), framing a faster Allegro vivace.  All of this was written in Bruch's ripest romantic style, and made for rewarding listening.  The combination of clarinet and viola created a warm, almost plush sound which suited the Nachtgesang in particular.

The Sonata for Flute and Piano, which came next, could be recognized as the work of Francis Poulenc within the first three or four measures.  It contained all of his signature ironic wit, merged (as ever) with melodic lyricism and unique key sense in equal parts.  Suzanne Shulman gave this piece exactly the kind of catchy, perky performance needed in the outer movements, with a gravely beautiful long-breathed line in the central Cantilena slow movement.  Peter Longworth's piano part cherished all the spicy little harmonic barbs while still keeping the piece in a light, almost Haydnesque scale of tone, very apt.

The showpiece finale was the Tarantella in A Minor Op. 6 by Saint-Saens, played by Shulman and Campbell with Longworth at the piano.  This piece is plainly written with the intention of showing off the skill of the players.  It starts out deceptively simple, with the pianist picking out a single line of ostinato bass, and then keeps adding on more and more and more layers of notes until the stage is practically spinning.  And of course, since it is a tarantella, there can be no letup in the moto perpetuo character of the music until the final chords.

The musical buffet continued in the afternoon's second concert, with the Cecilia Quartet (in their only Festival appearance this year) bringing us a Haydn quartet and a Mendelssohn quartet.  In presenting the Haydn, his Op. 17 No. 4 in C Minor, Hob.III.28, violinist Sarah Nematallah remarked that this is not one of the "nicknamed" Haydn quartets, and then offered the quartet's suggestion that it might be nicknamed "The Cat" -- which certainly struck me as apposite, since the work contains some slithering chromaticisms that do resemble the cat's meowing.  On the subject of the Mendelssohn, she speculated humorously on what kind of honeymoon Mendelssohn must have been having to have written such a turbulent, dramatic work during his months-long Grand Tour with his wife!

The Haydn work was genial and sunshiny in the classic Haydn manner, and the players relished that bright, positive quality in the music.  Again, Haydn was playing jokes on his audience: the Menuetto had a melody line which seemed over at 8 bars, then unexpectedly kept going for 4 more, and then tacked on an extra two just for the fun of it.  The quartet pointed up this double joke nicely each time it occurred without over-emphasizing it.  The trio similarly had a 10-bar melody instead of the expected eight, and again this was subtly noted.  The long, singing lines of the slow movement perfectly realized the direction Adagio cantabile, and the players ended the work with a great burst of energy in the allegro finale.

The Mendelssohn Quartet No. 4 in E Minor, Op. 44 is a sterner kind of piece altogether.  It would be easy to play it with a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing, and no doubt some critics with highly tilted noses think that there is nothing more than that in it.  But take it on its own terms -- and the Cecilia Quartet certainly did that -- and its intensity and energy are a match for almost anything in the repertoire, just achieved in different terms.  The first and last movements, dramatic and turbulent, both develop a terrific head of steam, rolling headlong forward, and the performance gained just that kind of momentum.  The scherzo at first sounds like another of Mendelssohn's masterly feather-light fairy scherzos, but soon develops a darker and heavier sound, and the quartet managed this transition very well too.  Again, we were treated to beautiful sustained legato in the slow movement.

The Thursday evening concert brought what I might term the "main course" of the musical buffet.  First we heard Beethoven's Piano Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 16.  Right from the outset, it was plain that this was the early Beethoven, still finding his wings as a composer.  The opening movement sounds very Haydnesque to me, while the lyrical side of Mozart isn't far away in the second movement andante cantabile.  It's in the finale that the genuine voice of Beethoven begins to emerge at last.

Given these observations, it's plain that you mustn't play this work with the same kind of weight and power you would bring to late Beethoven!  Renowned Canadian pianist Andre Laplante brought a fine combination of lightweight playing and a fine scale of tone to the larger moments without overpowering his colleagues.  The strings developed a good increase in the weight of playing in that finale, bringing the work right into the style of the mature Beethoven in the closing pages.

After the intermission, we heard the magnificent Cello Quintet in C Major, D.956 by Schubert.  This is one of the many miraculous masterpieces which Schubert composed during the last year of his life.  It stands alongside the three great piano sonatas, the last great quartets, numerous songs, and the Fantasy in F Minor for piano 4-hands as proof positive of an indomitable human spirit.  There's no question that Schubert was a driven man during that year, driven forward by the unappeasable creative spirit within him.  That struggle with himself, with his own illness and weakness, comes to the fore in one way or another in each of those final works, and this one is no exception.

But it is still the music of Schubert, and so the performers must allow full play to the lyrical gift, the melodious creation of which Schubert was the supreme exponent.  Also, both performers and audience must expand their sense of scale of time as Schubert again expands his ideas to what have rightly been called "heavenly lengths" -- never more heavenly than in the second movement of this work, where time itself seems to stand still.

As on the last occasion I heard this work at the Festival, this performance was preceded by a detailed talk with musical examples.  This is particularly helpful in a piece where so much of the structure is dominated by small figures, and by unusual modulations, rather than by long melodic statements which can be easily described in words.

This performance was given by an ensemble of players from different points of the compass.  This is a particular practice of this Festival, and one which gives plenty of scope for artists to meet and work with colleagues from other places.  It also gives the audience, on occasion, some of the most memorable performances.

In this case, we had violinists Gil Sharon and Doug Beilman, Ron Ephrat on viola, and Rolf Gjelsen and Yegor Dyachkov playing the two cello parts.  In some ways, the cellists are the key to this work as it is the warm, rich tone of the two cellos that tilts the entire piece away from the brighter, lighter sound of the violins so characteristic of much chamber music.

A key part of Gjelsen's pre-performance talk, by the way, was a demonstration of the way that the two cellos play very different roles in various parts of the work, one playing melodically while the other supplies the bass line.  Equally, though, there are other places -- the glorious second theme of the opening movement the supreme example -- where the cellos play together in 2-part harmony.

Every movement of this performance was full of moments of beauty, and each player found the glories inherent in his part.  As always, the entire performance stands or falls by the interpretation of the second movement.  Here, the slow, gentle dialogue between Sharon and Dyachkov at the opening was played in the gentlest of half-tones, no more than audible, and inexpressibly moving.  Schubert's "heavenly lengths" have never sounded finer.

One of the nastiest technical challenges ever set for musicians by Schubert is the sudden eruption of energy in the middle of that celestial slow movement.  The demonic cross-rhythms at this point are damn near impossible to nail right off the mark, and this case was no exception -- although the performance quickly gelled again within about 2 bars.

The rustic, rumbustious scherzo unleashed plenty of the energy so carefully harnessed and reserved in the preceding slow movement, and the two cellos made the most of the bagpipe-like drone effect in the opening bars of the main theme on each occurrence.  Indeed, this music gains if that drone is given with an edge of savagery and that was how it came across.

The final allegretto in a loose rondo form pulled all the threads together in the most satisfying way, and the final standing ovation was entirely merited.

In a way, I'm glad that this sublime masterwork doesn't get performed too often.  It unfolds a vision of such a rarefied universe all its own -- and I fear that too much familiarity would breed contempt.  For me, it is best left as an occasional encounter, one in which we are brought face to face with the clear wisdom of the ages and all the force of life-affirming energy -- as we certainly were last night.

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