My concern about having to wait until the end of this month before having a chance to hear Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart get "his proper due"
was eased this afternoon at Davies Symphony Hall, thanks to the Chamber
Music Series organized by the San Francisco Symphony. The K. 285 flute
quartet, composed in 1777, was given a stimulating and coherent reading
by Robin McKee (flute), John Chisholm (violin), Wayne Roden (viola) and
David Goldblatt (cello) to begin this afternoon's concert. There was
no sign of any of last night's problems
of strained interactions among unbalanced voices. Instead, one got to
enjoy a conversation among four equals, spiced with the reminder that,
when it came to playing chamber music, the viola was Mozart's instrument of choice.
Equally
loving attention was given to the music of Antonín Dvorák and Zoltán
Kodály. Following the Mozart, violinist Chen Zhao and cellist Amos Yang
offered an energetic reading of Kodály's Opus 7 duo. Even with my
modest understanding of Hungarian culture, I could appreciate why Béla
Bartók once declared Kodály "the composer whose works are the most
perfect embodiment of the Hungarian spirit." There is a soulfulness to
his music that goes beyond his ear for melody to the very timbrous
qualities he elicits from his instruments, and those qualities are
particularly evident when only two instruments are engaged in the
performance.
Dvorák concluded the program with his Opus 51 string
quartet in E-flat major, performed by violinists Melissa Kleinbart and
Suzanne Leon, violist Nanci Severance, and cellist Michael Grebanier.
This is Dvorák the Bohemian nationalist, rather than Dvorák the
observant visitor to America; and this quartet provides one of many
opportunities to hear his "bipolar" approach to the dumka form, which
sandwiches exuberance between outer sections of soul-searching
poignancy. As in the case with Mozart, Dvorák's chamber music always
involves a rich interplay of voices, whose details emerged in shining
clarity in this particular performance.
The Dvorák quartet was
preceded by what may best be called a "jazz interlude." Trumpeter Mark
Inouye teamed with a rhythm section of Scott Pingel on bass, Jeff
Massanari on guitar, and Raymond Froehlich on drums to perform his own
composition, "Tribute to Beeky," inspired by a small creature burrowing
in the beach sand near Galveston, Texas. This was clearly a lightweight
piece of work beside composers like Mozart, Dvorák, and Kodály; and I
fear that it did not make for very good company. As I tried to make
clear when I chose to write about Ahmad Jamal, I take my jazz very seriously; and I hope the message I conveyed in writing about him was that he took his music
(regardless of genre) very seriously. "Tribute to Beeky" did not
strike me as jazz to be taken seriously. Even if Inouye played it with a
relatively clean and well-articulated sound, there was just too much of
what my counterpoint teacher used to call "noodling," wandering around a
flurry of notes with little sense of direction. There also seemed to
be a need to play something on the same durational scale as the other
works on the program, while just about everything that needed to be said
had been said in about half as much time. Change can be refreshing,
but not when it overstays its welcome! If this is a sign of what one
can expect from the new Davies After Hours series, then, where the trumpet is involved, I think I shall stick to my recordings of Clifford Brown!
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