Jean-Yves Thibaudet and an ensemble from the Colburn School perform a chamber program this evening at Boulez-Saal in Berlin.
Frank Gehry, architect of Boulez-Saal and a friend of Daniel Barenboim, has also designed a 100,000 square-foot expansion of the Colburn School campus in downtown LA, including a 1,000-seat, in-the-round performance space, a studio theater, dance studios, and public gardens and green spaces. Reuniting with Gehry for that project is another name familiar to Berliners: Yasuhisa Toyota of Nagata Acoustics, who served as acoustician for Boulez-Saal (along with other Gehry buildings, including Disney Concert Hall). The new Colburn performance hall, expected to open to the public in 2025, will have parallels with Boulez-Saal.
Here’s a video of the West-Eastern Divan Ensemble performing Mendelssohn’s Octet at Boulez-Saal in 2021.
On the agenda at the Boulez-Saal in Berlin tonight is this program by the West-Eastern Divan Ensemble. It’s an interesting mix of Jörg Widmann, Dvořák, Hindemith, and Enescu. My program notes here.
Seattle Chamber Music Society’s 2023 edition of the Winter Festival has started, presenting two weekends of chamber music by Beethoven, Fanny Mendelssohn, Ravel, William Grant Still, Julia Perry, et al. plus a new work by contemporary American composer Jeremy Turner, who is especially known for his TV and stage scores.
The second weekend of concerts includes the local premiere (Feb. 3) of Turner’s Six Mile House for clarinet, violin, piano, and cello. which was inspired by the Charleston, SC-based urban legend about Sweeney Todd-ish murders said to have been committed by an evil innkeeper couple.
SCMS Artistic Director James Ehnes will be onstage for the three concerts of the second weekend, playing works by Brahms, Shostakovich, and César Franck. And a free prelude recital is open to the public before each concert — no ticket required. Here’s the free prelude lineup:
January 27 – 6:30PM Richard Strauss: Violin Sonata, Op.18 Arnaud Sussmann, violin Jeewon Park, piano
January 28 – 6:30PM Franz Schubert: Fantasie in F minor, D. 940 Dmitri Shostakovich: Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67 SCMS Academy Musicians
January 29 – 2:00PM Sergei Prokofiev: Piano Sonata No. 6, Op. 82 Adam Neiman, piano
February 3 – 6:30PM Julia Perry: Prelude William Grant Still: Three Visions George Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue, solo version 1924 Andrew Armstrong, piano
February 4 – 6:30PM Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Trio in C minor, Op. 1 No. 3 SCMS Academy Musicians
February 5 – 2:00PM Franz Joseph Haydn: String Quartet in F minor, Op. 20, No. 5 James Ehnes and Amy Schwartz Moretti, violins; Che-Yen Chen, viola; Edward Arron, cello
Byron Schenkman & Friends continue their 10th-anniversary season with a program on Thursday, 29 December (at 7pm at Benaroya Hall), juxtaposing the piano trio format with lieder. Beethoven’s Archduke Trio, a pinnacle of the piano trio from 1810-11, will be heard alongside 2021 Sphinx Medal of Excellence winner Carlos Simon‘s luminous be still and know, a composition from 2015 inspired by an interview with Oprah Winfrey. Filling out the program are songs by Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert featuring vocalist Martin Bakari, winner of the 2018 George London Competition.
The complete program is as follows:
Carlos Simon (b. 1986):
be still and know for piano trio
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791):
Abendempfindung (“Evening Thoughts”) (K. 523) Zufriedenheit (“Contentment”) (K. 473)
Franz Schubert (1979-1828):
Du bist die Ruh (“You are Repose”) (D. 776)
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827):
Adelaide, op. 46
Ludwig van Beethoven:
Trio in B-flat, op. 97
Allegro moderato Scherzo Andante cantabile, ma però con moto Allegro moderato
Juilliard String Quartet, The Juilliard School, Wednesday, May 4, 2022. Credit Photo: Erin Baiano
Soon after I wrote about the Juilliard String Quartet (JSQ) for Strings magazine on the occasion of its 75th-anniversary season last year, Roger Tapping’s illness worsened; the beloved violist, who had played with the ensemble since 2013, died in January 2022. One of the programs the JSQ had planned for the anniversary centered around Beethoven’s Op. 130 Quartet in B-flat major and had already been postponed from its originally intended performance during the 2020 homages to the composer. That program, titled “Cavatina,” was finally presented on November 15 at the University of Washington’s Meany Center for the Performing Arts.
Molly Carr, who had been mentored by Tapping, was welcomed into the ensemble in May as the late violist’s successor. They are currently in the midst of a West Coast tour for the first time in this new formation: Areta Zhulla and Ronald Copes, violins; Molly Carr, viola; and Astrid Schween, cello. With this personnel, the JSQ will bring the “Beethoven “Cavatina” program back home to New York at the end of the month at Alice Tully Hall — exactly a year after it had originally been scheduled.
The concept behind “Cavatina” involves an intriguing blend of an enigmatic and unfathomably profound repertoire monument — for some, the most excellent of Beethoven’s quartets — with music by a living composer who has a valuable perspective to offer on his predecessor.
The JSQ juxtaposed Beethoven’s massive work from 1825-26 with a pair of string quartets by the prominent German composer Jörg Widmann that they had commissioned as commentary pieces on Op. 130; they concluded the challenging program with a performance of the Op. 133 Grosse Fuge, which Beethoven initially intended to serve as the finale of Op. 130.
Ronald Copes offered a brief but eloquent introduction to the project that explained its newly acquired layer of significance as a memorial for their late colleague Roger Tapping. During its first decades starting in the mid-20th century, under founding member Robert Mann’s guidance, the JSQ had firmed up its reputation as an intellectually inclined, Modernist powerhouse, its Beethoven refracted through the lens of Bartók, for example. In some ways, this performance suggested a radical reset — and an attempt to recreate the sheer strangeness and enigma Beethoven’s late quartets must have posed to his contemporaries. The musicians emphasized the principle of contrast — so astoundingly different from High Classical contrast — that makes Beethoven sound perennially experimental.
This was especially evident in their pacing of the pauses and unison attacks in the long first movement and the eccentric humor they brought out in the dance movements. The fifth-movement Cavatina became the axis around which this gigantic quartet revolved, and it inspired the most directly emotional playing I’ve heard from the Juilliards. Copes memorably described the heartbreak in this music as “Beethoven trying to control the sadness.” Their account, unsentimental but not stoic, was exceptionally moving, the players breathing together as one organism. The return to earth in the later, more modest finale Beethoven designed for Op. 130 brought to mind the mechanism of release Bach inserts in the Goldberg Variations, near the very end of the journey, with the Quodlibet: a new acceptance of the reality of ordinary life, which of course can never be perceived in the same way after what has just been experienced.
The evening’s second half presented the two new Widmann quartets. I couldn’t determine where these were first premiered — apparently at some point earlier this season — but the commission had been a special passion project of Roger Tapping. The first, Widmann’s Quartet No. 8 (Beethoven Study III) is in three movements and explodes into life as a meditation on the energy and strangeness of Op. 130. What Widmann accomplishes isn’t a sterile deconstruction or postmodern round dance about a defined parameter but a provocative reimagining. As the JSQ attempted through their primary account of Op. 130, Widmann’s musical response seeks to recreate the utter weirdness of Beethoven’s late quartets when they were first introduced. Pleasures abounded in the JSQ’s performance, such as listening to Widmann’s rethink of the core principle of variation with a “permanent calling into question of assertions.” The final movement ended with the sound of an impossible lightness, like a balloon let go to drift upward into invisibility.
Widmann has actually composed five quartets he calls “Beethoven Studies” (his String Quartets Nos. 6-10), which are somehow tethered to Op. 130. The last of these (Cavatina — Beethoven Study V), also commissioned by the JSQ, concludes this cycle with a reflection on Beethoven’s Adagio movement — “one of the most emotional movements ever written by Beethoven,” as Widmann puts it, with a certain degree of understatement. In contrast to the structural intricacies and playful games of his Quartet No. 8, he lets loose in this single-movement work with “a free form of ardent singing and flowing,” in the composer’s words, “marking the conclusion of the cycle which grapple so vehemently and sensuously with the cosmos of Beethoven’s quartets.”
Beethoven was famously persuaded to publish the Grosse Fuge as a standalone piece, replacing it with a much shorter, dance-like, and definitively lighter-hearted finale — the revised finale we had heard on the first half of the program (which is the last piece of music the composer completed before his death in 1827, aside from various sketches). In their rendition of the Grosse Fuge that concluded the program, the JSQ lost some of the focus that had made Op. 130 so riveting. Perhaps this was in itself an interpretive choice, but to this listener the unrelenting, raw thrust of Beethoven’s writing gave way to unexpectedly smoother edges.
Music on the Strait 2022 Opening Night: Demarre McGill and Jeremy Denk play Beach and Franck
The 2022 Music on the Strait season began on Friday (see above) with a spotlight on the extraordinary flutist Demarre McGill, who was featured in works by Debussy and Amy Beach in the opening night program. Joining McGill were violinists Elisa Barston and James Garlick (Music on the Strait’s co-artistic director) violist David Auerbach, cellist Efe Baltacıgil, and pianist Jeremy Denk (2022 special guest artist), who will perform César Franck’s Piano Quintet in F minor.
The festival takes place on Washington’s beautiful Olympic Peninsula over two weekends, from 26 August to 3 September:
August 26: Opening Night with virtuoso flautist Demarre McGill
August 27: Efe Baltacıgil and Jeremy Denk play Beethoven
August 28: Every Good Boy Does Fine: Jeremy Denk in Recital and Conversation
September 2: Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet
September 3: Festival Finale: A World Premiere by Paul Chihara
ROSTER OF 2022 ARTISTS:
VIOLIN: Elisa Barston, Kyu-Young Kim, James Garlick
Verona Quartet with Anne-Marie McDermott, photo (c) Jorge Gustavo Elias
Last night I got my first sample of the chamber side of Bravo! Vail Music Festival with a smart program featuring the Verona Quartet and Artistic Director Anne-Marie McDermott at the keyboard. Puccini’s early “Crisantemi” and the first of Beethoven’s Op. 18 string quartets revealed a flair for finely calibrated ensemble balance and color, with a cross-connection of moods traced between Beethoven’s Adagio and the elegiac Puccini miniature.
For me the highlight was an impassioned performance of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 1 — also a youthful work, in fact written when he was only 18 — for which McDermott joined the Veronese to play the taxing, ever-present piano part with power and poise. Together they made a brilliant case for this shamefully long ignored gem, obviously enjoying the fecundity of Coleridge-Taylor’s imagination. Captivating from start to finish, this is the kind of performance that thankfully is reclaiming his work the repertoire.
Also the first commission by Byron Schenkman & Friends, Woody composed nor shape of today to a text by Raquel Salas Rivera, a queer Puerto Rican and Philadelphian of non-binary gender. His new work is a response or companion piece to Brahms’s Op. 91 songs for alto, viola, and piano.
Jonathan Woodley has provided this commentary on his new work: “In composing this piece, I very much wanted to consider it a companion to Johannes Brahms’s Two Songs for Voice, Viola and Piano, op. 91. The Brahms songs deal with longing–the longing for stillness, for respite from the tormented mind, and in the case of the second Brahms song, Geistliches Wiegenlied (Sacred Lullaby), the longing of Mary to protect her child from the tribulations he eventually must face. In our twenty-first century existence, many individuals still experience a longing for a place to belong, and I was struck by the similarity between these Romantic sentiments and the experience of trans and non-binary individuals, who face relentless pressure to conform to outdated norms surrounding gender and identity in our supposedly modern world. The poet Raquel Salas Rivera writes in a deeply moving and eloquent way about these experiences, and his poetry struck me as perfectly situated to answer the Brahms songs on poems by Rückert and Geibel (a paraphrase of a poem originally in Spanish by Lope de Vega). Rivera writes in both English and Spanish, and the fluidity between the two languages was an inspiration to me in creating this song. I attempt to emulate Salas Rivera’s fluidity in gender and language by incorporating a fluidity in musical idiomatic expression; at times nor shape of today sounds like Romantic music, like Baroque music, and like music of the 21st century. While I don’t share the experience of those with trans and non-binary identities, I hoped to capture the sense of longing that so many human beings feel to belong, to be loved, and to be safe.”
Complete Program:
Intro 1:10 – Jonathan Woody: stone and steel 8:45 – Johannes Brahms: Sapphic Ode, Op. 94, no. 4 11:53 – Franz Schubert: Song of Old Age, D. 778 17:20 – Johannes Brahms: Intermezzo in A, Op. 118, no. 2 24:01 – Johannes Brahms: Lullaby, Op. 49, no. 4, for voice and piano 26:21 – Johannes Brahms: Two Songs for voice, viola, and piano 39:14 – Jonathan Woody: nor shape of today.
On 23 March 2022, Orca Concerts series presents an evening of French and Brazilian chamber music featuring clarinetist Sean Osborn, pianist Angela Draghicescu, and Seattle Symphony musicians Ben Hausmann (oboe) and Luke Fieweger (bassoon). Titled Les Six-and-a-Half, it’s quite an interesting program: Germaine Tailleferre: Sonata champêtre (1972); Heitor Villa-Lobos: Trio for Oboe, Clarinet, and Bassoon (1921); Darius Milhaud: Duo concertante (1956); and Francis Poulenc: Trio pour hautbois, basson, et piano, FP 43 (1926).
The performance will be at the Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center at 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N. in Seattle. Tickets General: $30, Senior: $20, Student and Under 19: FREE.
From the press release: “Les Six was a collective of composers in France in the early 20th-century, organized in part by philosopher Jean Cocteau and composer Erik Satie. Their neo-classic style of composition embraced lightness, charm, melody, and was also a reaction to the excesses of Wagner and Impressionists like Debussy. Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Trio from 1921 employs sophisticated overlapping rhythms, ostinato, and melodic fragments for an otherworldly sense of place.”
For the first time since it began in 2018, Music on the Strait (MOTS) is partnering this summer with Concerts in the Barn to present a third performance for each of the festival’s two weekends. Scheduled for Sundays in Quilcene (about an hour southeast of Port Angeles), these concerts repeat one of the Friday/Saturday programs and are available to the public on a free/pay-what-you-can basis (prior registration required).
Determined to have the full experience of MOTS both at its Port Angeles venue (Peninsula College’s Maier Hall) and at the Barn, my partner and I caught the Takács Quartet on Sunday afternoon in its repeat of Friday’s opening program. Connected with the Concerts in the Barn series is a moving story of its own involving reconciliation with the descendants of the Japanese American family who had owned the land before they were forced into internment camps in the Second World War. Alan Iglitzin, the legendary violist who founded the Port Townsend-based Olympic Music Festival and cofounded the Philadelphia Quartet, established the series in 1984 in an abandoned dairy barn at Trillium Woods Farm near Quilcene (venue pictured above and just below).
With the Takács, MOTS’s co-founder, the Grammy Award-winning violist Richard O’Neill, was able to present what he has been up to most recently as the newest member of that revered ensemble. He offered some prefatory comments recalling his epiphany in this very space, as a youngster spellbound in the audience on July 3, 1993, when he heard a performance of the Death and the Maiden Quartet and realized he wanted to spend his life making music like this. O’Neill gave a touching tribute to Iglitzin (who remains active as he heads into his 90s), pointing out how his efforts have left a lasting imprint.
Inside the Barn; photo credit J. Gustavo Elias
We found a comfortable spot atop a hay bale for the first half and tried out the loft in back for the second; the acoustics were consistently warm, natural, direct. As far as could be ascertained, this was the first time the Takács Quartet was performing in an actual barn (though O’Neill and violinist Harumi Rhodes had individually appeared in the same space before). The relaxed setting, with audience reclining on the grass outside and listening via speakers, was inversely proportional to the intensity of involvement in the music-making (for the Takács and audience alike).
The program presented three hefty staples of the repertoire, in the process tracing a branch of the Viennese Classical tradition and an early modern offshoot. Melancholy and subdued serenity took the lead at the start of Haydn’s F minor Quartet from the genre-defining Op. 20 set of 1772.
Edward Dusinberre’s exquisite descants in the slow movement had the flexibility of first-rate jazz, blooming across the basic lilt of the siciliana, while ensemble ebb-and-pull at a breakneck pace imbued the double-fugue finale with thrilling emotion. From this kind of realization, it became understandable how Beethoven would later mine such potential from what must have seemed, to contemporaries, the hopelessly antiquated constraints of string counterpoint.
Gears were immediately shifted for Ravel’s sole essay in the genre, the early Quartet in F major from 1903, both modeled on and knowingly independent of Debussy’s contribution from a decade before. O’Neill’s rich, demonstrative viola personality — amply on display as Ravel’s writing ventures ever further into timbral experiment — was but one strand of a winningly characterful account. At one moment of mysterious tremoli, a dulcet breeze wafted through the open barn doors and across the space, a perfectly timed accompaniment.
Time and again, as in András Fejér’s superbly articulated solo work in the cello-centered variation of the second movement of the Schubert, the Takács demonstrated their winning secret of accommodating strikingly individual voices while maintaining coherence and unity of purpose as an ensemble. This is, in large part, the result of the sort of close listening that allowed such an impressive display of dynamic range and control in the Assez vif, as well as such infinite tenderness amid the tempo changes of Ravel’s slow movement.
An intriguingly balletic quality enriched the final movement. Dance of a far more dreadful vividness was the driving force in the last two movements of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden from 1824, to which the concert’s second half was devoted.
Takács Quartet (EdwardDusinberre, Harumi Rhodes, Richard O’Neill, and András Fejér) ; photo credit J. Gustavo Elias
But the Takács set the stage with a surprising take on the opening movement: here, they almost downplayed the obvious drama and emphasized melodic consolation instead, clinging to Schubert’s Siren-like phrases as if to a life raft. As the afternoon sun stole through a crack in the wood above the players, a gleam briefly lit up the body of Fejér’s cello during the variation movement from which Schubert’s Quartet got its nickname; later, the whispered violin-and-viola reprise of the theme was as chilling as a prolonged death rattle.
The final tarantella kept looping back in terrifyingly relentless repetitions, a nightmare Groundhog Day with no escape in the Takács’ feverish, sweat-soaked rendition.
There is one more weekend to experience the 2021 Music on the Strait Festival; both programs feature Jeremy Denk, James Garlick, Ani Aznavoorian, and Richard O’Neill. Friday’s concert (20 August) is titled A Belated Beethoven Celebration; on Saturday (21 August), the Barn-Burning Brahms finale presents music by Jessie Montgomery, Paul Hindemith, and Johannes Brahms, which will be repeated Sunday (22 August) at 2pm as part of the Concerts in the Barn series in Quilcene.