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Music of the Spheres Society
(Music of the Spheres Website)
Stephanie Chase, Artistic Director
Stephanie Chase and Michi Wiancko, violin
Hsin-Yun Huang, viola
Julie Albers and Darrett Adkins, cello
Jon Manasse, clarinet
Frank Lévy, piano
At
Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall
(Carnegie Hall Website)
Press: Nolan Robertson
Nikolas J. Lund
February 2, 2007
Program:
Erno Dohnányi (1877-1960)
Serenade for String Trio, Op. 10 (1902)
I. Marcia
II. Romanza
III. Scherzo
IV. Tema con variazoni
V. Rondo
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano (1891)
I. Allegro
II. Adagio
III. Andantino grazioso – Trio
IV. Allegro
David Jaedyn Conley (1967-)
The Mydnyte Sun (2003) American Premiere
Part I. The Inevitability of Night
Part II. The Mydnyte Sun
Part III. Astronomica
Part IV. The Inevitability of Dawn
Darius Milhaud (1892-1974)
La Création du Monde (Suite de Concert, 1923)
I. Prélude
II. Fugue
III. Romance
IV. Scherzo
V. Final
Delayed by the rain tonight, I arrived at Weill with the chimes already sounding and had not even the briefest of moments to look over the program notes for the evening’s concert. And so much the better. The program laid out for the evening was quite diverse, and I found it far more enjoyable to confront the music at the level of sound and form as instantaneously perceived. I did, however, see on the cover of the program that the concert proposed a theme of “Night Music,” and I am overall inclined to agree that the pieces chosen all had a sensuous seriousness suiting them well for the nocturnal atmosphere. If nothing else, nothing tonight seemed inappropriate to my evening-time mood.
The first piece on the program, Dohnányi’s Serenade for String Trio, furnished an opportunity to consider the works from one of those neglected but nevertheless highly capable composers working in that fleeting transitional moment between the last two centuries, reveling in the glorious possibilities of musical language and form that had been perfected through the work of the later Romantics, while anticipating in curious moments the languages that would eventually become so saturate in the works of the earliest Moderns. The space in-between these vastly general categories, of course, is not to be mapped un-carefully (or really perhaps at all) but pieces precisely like this Trio are important to hear once in a while if only that we might preserve some sense that the perplexing historical transitions and breakings-away of these early 1900s were not entirely arbitrary in their radicalism. That the musicians tonight should have programmed this piece in particular is commendable.
Even more pertinent to the question of perplexing histories however was the Clarinet Trio by Brahms, which, once one gets past all of the Brahms in the piece, stands as one the most fascinatingly self-conscious explorations of Tone and the way in which the re-situation of that Tone into a pre-developed realm of musical language really does call forth the question of a certain instrumentation in relation to history. Or more simply put, a clarinet and a cello and a piano sounds nothing like the rest of Brahms, and strikes us as quite unexpected. It presents timbres to the ear which seem part of a different future entirely. The piece is filled with moments of rhythmic and harmonic subtlety, so characteristic of Brahms’ late work, which flash by so quickly and deftly that one is not sure if one has heard such unease or not. The second and third time around, of course, they begin to grow undeniably present…but tonight it was pleasurable enough to hear them once in their fleeting strangeness and to let their thinly veiled anguish not disrupt our “Night Music” too too much. Especially after the Dohnányi.
Of the “new work” on the program, there is not a tremendous amount to say. As Artistic Director and First Violinist Stephanie Chase mused before the piece began, the piece seemed to bear a certain quality of “Generation X” within it. In my ears, this translated into a work filled with a vaguely paranoid mysticism, building and brooding indefinitely before terminating in a loud and somewhat arbitrary way in every movement. There was perhaps also a reference to the theme from The Simpsons. The piece was indeed well written for its instruments and showed a sensitivity to contrapuntal writing. It really did have some lovely moments - but, once it was linked so inevitably to historical moments so encrusted with its own connotations, it became quite impossible for me to listen to it in any other way. Not that I should have heard any more or less, of course, but I perhaps would have had less to formulate an historical critique with. But oh well. It is a shame that new music is so often preceded with a note of introduction. As though it needed to apologize for itself.
The last piece on the program, Milhaud’s La Création du Monde, made for one last fun historical voyage through the night. The music ranges in its sweep from the restrained and gentle influences of Satie to an undeniable obsession emerging in Milhaud for the music of 1920s Harlem. As an attempt to re-introduce this music into the concert forms of a very European culture, it is undeniably a music of appropriation. It is perfectly co-current with the work of those like Gershwin and sounded precisely as such. There are though, in the moments where the European is letting his own fantasy wander, also moments which prefigure the uniquely French luxuries of ones like Ravel.
The music tonight was all played quite thoughtfully and well. There were moments in the violins and violas where I thought that the phrasing could have been more careful, and certainly places where greater contrasts could have emphasized the richesse of each piece better, but at no point did I ever suspect that any deficiencies were the result of emotional divesture. Some fine Night Music indeed.
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