Last night's final Chamber Music Masters concert for the season at
the San Francisco Conservatory of Music featured violinist Robert Mann
(on his annual visit to the Conservatory), five members of the
Conservatory Faculty, ten Conservatory students, and one Conservatory
alumnus. It was an evening of rich diversity, during which the familiar
music of Antonín Dvorák and Maurice Ravel served as bookends for the
less familiar works of Samuel Barber and Anton Webern.
The evening began with the same work that had concluded the recent recital by the Prazak Quartet with Menahem Pressler (a familiar face at the Conservatory).
This was Dvorák's A major piano quintet (Opus 81), which once again
received a passionate reading. If the Prazak performance had been more
nuanced, that was probably because they have been performing together
since 1972 and had past collaborations with Pressler. However, while
their performance seemed to be under a "chain of command" (as I tried to argue on my blog),
last night's "faculty-student mix" had more "network connectivity." It
is the many opportunities for such "connectivity" that frequently make
Conservatory performances so exciting, and this performance certainly
made for a stimulating occasion.
Following the intermission (to
move the piano, which would no longer be needed), the program continued
with Barber's Opus 3 setting of Matthew Arnold's poem, "Dover Beach" for
baritone and string quartet. Arnold was a highly erudite poet; and
"Dover Beach" is rich with his erudition. However, much of that
erudition is Classical; and Barber had a keen sense of interpreting
Ancient Greek material as music. In the poem Arnold reflects on the
human condition from the setting of a shore looking out on a quiet
English Channel. ("The Sea is calm to-night.") Barber invokes that Sea
as an introduction, and maintains its sense of place behind a
relatively straightforward delivery of the four stanzas of the poem. As
the Opus number suggests, this is a relatively early work but extremely
impressive for its delivery of a highly sophisticated text in such an
effective natural voice. Conservatory students should do this work more
often, particularly since a conservatory setting is conducive to
bringing a baritone together with a string quartet!
The remainder
of the evening belonged entirely to string quartets. Webern's Opus 5
set of short pieces contrasted sharply with Barber's "calm Sea;" but,
as I tried to suggest yesterday in a blog post about Arnold Schoenberg,
the sense of place was just as strong. This was the "good old Vienna"
that Virgil Thomson has cited as the source of emotional energy behind
the music of Schoenberg and his pupils. This was most evident in the
use of glissando in the first of the pieces, not as heavy as one would
find in Gustav Mahler but pronounced enough to be effective; but this
is not the Vienna of nineteenth-century nostalgia. It is the Vienna on
the brink of that "fall of eagles" that served as the title of Cyrus Lee
Sulzberger's book about the radical changes of early twentieth-century
Europe. All of that emotional tension was packed into five short
pieces, the fourth of which (with its "three-line" structure) is
practically a haiku; and the students who performed these pieces
captured that tension admirably.
Following Webern, the Ravel F
major string quartet (composed six years earlier) was very much a
soothing emotional relief. This was the only work that Mann performed,
playing first violin to Ian Swenson's second and Jean-Michel Fonteneau's
cello. All of these teachers were joined by student Alexa Beatie on
viola. For all of the recent French interest in "spectral music,"
we need Ravel to remind us that the richest sonorities reside in the
instruments themselves, rather than in the physics of those
instruments. A full palette of those rich sonorities was summoned in
this performance of the Ravel quartet as the final course of what had
turned out to be an extensive meal, satisfying in its diversity.
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