April 24, 2005: American women's voices (and others)

Every now and then a concert is presented with a title that usually (but not always) spares me the mental exercise of figuring out whether or not the works being performed have any unifying theme.  Last night's performance by members of The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in Herbst Theatre (presented by San Francisco Performances) was entitled American Voices and covered a span of music history from 1795 to 2006.  This would have been enough to make for a unique evening, but even more interesting was that one of the works was a setting of the 1850 journal of a pioneer woman and another was the 1908 piano quintet of the first major American woman composer, Amy Beach.

The pioneer woman was Margaret Frink, and passages from her daily journal constituted the libretto for Vignettes:  Covered Wagon Woman by Alan Louis Smith on a commissioned for mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe and pianist Warren Jones by Music Accord, Inc., a national consortium of presenters of which San Francisco Performances is a member.  Blythe and Jones were joined by two other Chamber Music Society members, violinist Ani Kavafian and cellist Pricilla Lee.  The work was composed in 2006 and first performed at Lincoln Center on February 22, 2008.  Presumably the current tour is providing an opportunity for the consortium members to present the work to their respective audiences.  In addition Blythe and Smith gave some introductory remarks about an hour before the concert began.

Blythe decided that the text would not be provided to the audience during the performance.  As she explained in her remarks, the prose text is particularly clear;  and she was confident that her diction would deliver that prose with equal clarity.  Ruth Felt, President of San Francisco Performances, repeated this explanation to the entire audience, announcing that texts would be available in the lobby after the intermission.  Blythe was certainly right about her diction, and her subtle use of posture and gesture definitely enhanced the clarity of the text.  She wanted all eyes on her, and those who obeyed were rewarded with the full impact of this composition.

For that matter I would have to say that the composition itself was rewarded by her commitment to its performance.  There was a little too much sentimentality for my usual tastes;  and the process of getting from Martinsville, Indiana to Sacramento, California tended to feel like the long journey it actually was.  (I sometimes call this the "Lindbergh effect," particularly in the context of Billy Wilder's Spirit of St. Louis film, when it feels like Jimmy Stewart has been peering forever in search of his first glimpse of French soil.)  True to the title of the composition, each movement was a relatively brief vignette;  but I still found myself wondering, even with Blythe's sureness of pace, if we needed all thirteen of them.

I had no such wondering where Beach's Opus 67 piano quintet was concerned.  As I had already indicated in my preview for this concert, I have heard this work three times within the past twelve months and blogged about each of those performances.  Eric Bromberger's program notes provided a useful context for the newcomer:

Beach composed her Piano Quintet in 1907–08, and she was the pianist at its first performance on February 20, 1908 in Boston.  The world of music was in ferment in 1908:  in that year Mahler composed Das Lied von der Erde, Schoenberg his Second String Quartet, and Scriabin his Poem of Ecstasy.  There is not the slightest trace of these new directions in Beach's Piano Quintet, which remains firmly rooted in the 19th-century musical traditions with which she had grown up.  Brahms himself would have felt comfortable with the form and grand sonority of her Piano Quintet, though he might have been surprised by the chromaticism of her writing.

Actually, while that chromaticism might have surprised Brahms, one of my earliest impressions was that it felt right at home with the chamber music of Gabriel Fauré;  and, in one of my blog posts, I singled out Fauré's first (Opus 13) violin sonata and the first (Opus 15) piano quartet as sources for orienting the ear to Beach's own chromatic language.

More interesting was the way in which the members of The Chamber Music Society (pianist Anne-Marie McDermott, violinists Ani Kavafian and Lily Francis, violist Paul Neubauer, and cellist Pricilla Lee) situated this music in a light quite different from that of my previous listening experiences.  All of those past experiences were at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (although the first involved William Wellborn and the Ives Quartet, rather than any students);  and I was impressed with how Beach had conceived of a work for five "equals."  This constituted a different kind of departure from Brahms than Bromberger's observation about chromaticism, since Brahms' piano virtuosity would often make his chamber music sound like a "concerto for piano and very small orchestra."  That "Brahms effect" was more present in the Lincoln Center performance than in the past performances I had heard, possibly because the spirit of Brahms' virtuosity seemed to thrive in McDermott's approach to the piano part.  This is not to say that the rest of the ensemble was reduced to insignificance.  Each member of the quartet had a major say in the "journey" of this composition;  and I particularly appreciated Neubauer reminding me of how much I enjoyed Beach's characteristic approach to the viola.

It is also important to note that those four string players worked very well together as a quartet.  The Beach quintet was preceded by their performance of George Gershwin's 1920 "Lullaby," which was never published in his lifetime.  This puts it eight years before his meeting with Maurice Ravel but about seventeen years after Ravel had composed his string quartet.  So it would not surprise me if Gershwin had been exposed to Ravel's quartet before undertaking his own.  The "Lullaby" is much shorter;  but it definitely shares Ravel's keen ear for the rich palette of sonorities that violin, viola, and cello are capable of delivering.  It is also a miniature study in syncopation with a slight hint of ragtime applied with a subtlety that Ravel never quite grasped in his own efforts to honor the innovations taking place in the United States.  The performers were clearly comfortable with Gershwin's approach to both color and rhythm, providing a bit of calm before the more Brahms-like "storm" of Beach's quintet.

Bromberger also observed that it is a bit of a stretch to call John Antes, whose D minor trio for two violins and cello (Opus 3, Number 2) opened the program, an "American voice."  He was born in Pennsylvania in 1740, the son of Moravian immigrants, crossed the Atlantic in 1764, and never returned.  He did missionary work in Egypt (which Bromberger called "a disaster") and lived primarily in Germany until he became business manager of the Moravian community in Fulneck, England in 1783.  The three Opus 3 trios were published in 1795.  Antes was aware of Joseph Haydn's visits to London in the 1790s and may have corresponded with him.  Haydn seems to have liked this particular form of string trio and composed about twenty works for it, but the last of them was completed in 1768.  I am not (yet) familiar with these Haydn compositions;  but I have become very aware of his sensitivity to the characteristic colors of instruments in the string family.  Antes' trio is particularly interesting to the extent that it shares that sensitivity to color, not too surprising given that, as a teenager, he was responsible for making some of the earliest string instruments constructed in America.  Francis, Kavafian, and Lee performed this work with the same loving attention they had given to Gershwin's sense of color, leaving the listener eager to hear more of this rarely-performed Moravian from Pennsylvania.