Presumably the Basically British series of concerts in the Old
First Concerts series, held at Old First Church, is the brain child of
pianist John Parr, since he was the only British member of the
performing ensemble, which also consisted of violinist Joe Edelberg,
violist Anna Kruger, and cellist Thalia Moore. Last night's offering
was the thirteenth in this series, but it was the first one I had an
opportunity to attend. There is a sad tendency to be dismissive about
British composers, particularly those of the nineteenth century, as if
they were blithely ignorant of how much was happening on the other side
of the English Channel. (Even James Levine has exhibited this tendency
in the pages of Robert Marsh's Dialogues & Discoveries
book.) Last night Parr did an admirable job of bringing three such
composers to the attention of an audience that had probably never heard
any of them; and, as a result, the evening allowed us to examine the
rich fabric of music history under new lights.
The composer
most likely to be known was also represented by the most recent work on
the program. However, Frank Bridge is best known by his name appearing
in the title of Benjamin Britten's early (1937) "Variations on a Theme
of Frank Bridge." Bridge was Britten's teacher; and through this work
we could appreciate his theme for its angular melodic line and uneven
phrases, indicators of much of Britten's own subsequent rhetoric. Last
night Bridge himself was represented by his "Phantasy" for piano quartet
in F-sharp minor, composed in 1910. If I may be allowed a modest bit
of American flag-waving, in the overall chronology of music history, the
Bridge "Phantasy" is a close successor to Amy Beach's Opus 67 piano quintet,
performed here by The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center this past
April. Having come to know that work moderately well, I have observed
the influence of Gabriel Fauré
on her chromatic language; and in the Bridge piano quartet I heard
signs of a similar influence. Bridge thus refutes any of those silly
suggestions about willful ignorance of the Continent while delivering a
fantasy structure of four seamlessly connected movements in a decidedly
unique voice. Parr's ensemble had no trouble capturing the spirit of
that voice, leaving one with the feeling that Bridge deserves more
attention than he currently receives (which was probably Parr's
intention).
Bridge's own teacher was the Irish composer Charles
Villiers Stanford. Those who have turned to XM Satellite Radio as a
source for classical music probably know Stanford through his
symphonies. However, Parr suggested that last night's performance of
his 1879 Opus 15 F major piano quartet was probably a San Francisco
premiere, if not a premiere on a larger geographical scale. For those
who view music history as a vast network of personal influences,
Stanford is a rather significant linchpin. He was the teacher of
his time, having an impact on the crop of British composers that
emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century; and, again contrary
to any nasty rumors, he brought to his classes a rich understanding of
the many paths along which music was developing in nineteenth-century
Europe. Indeed, as Parr observed, one hears more than a healthy share
of those influences in this piano quartet; but one also hears the work
of a composer with a full command of all the idioms of his time and a
determination to get beyond them with his own approach to rhetoric. If
hearing Bridge was facilitated by past listening experiences with
Britten, then it was appropriate for Parr to arrange his program to
allow us to hear Stanford after our experience with Bridge.
Thus,
the half-century that covers the last quarter of the nineteenth century
and the first quarter of the twentieth were a far richer time for
British music than "prevailing wisdom" would have us believe. If the
same could be said of the beginning of the nineteenth century, then the
1822 piano trio by George Onslow did not make a very strong case. The
introductory remarks gave the impression that Onslow's greatest
accomplishment was the composition of eighteen string quintets that
required two cellos, thus inspiring Franz Schubert's D. 956 C major string quintet,
one of the many monuments from his final year of composing. This piano
trio, on the other hand, involved an outpouring of virtuoso demands on
the piano, most of them performed at a breakneck pace that the violin
and cello strained mightily to maintain. Felix Mendelssohn apparently
knew Onslow's music and seems to have approved of his tempi, which would
not surprise anyone familiar with Mendelssohn's own piano
compositions. Still, in the domain of piano trios at the beginning of
the nineteenth century, Onslow had some pretty stiff competition against
which he could not hold his own as well as either Stanford or Bridge
had done among their contemporaries.
However, even with
Onslow's shortcomings, Parr's program was a delightful way to expand
one's scope of music history. It is too easy to be bounded in the
nutshell of the "standard repertoire" and feel "a king of infinite
space" for knowing that repertoire intimately. Parr graciously took a
nutcracker to that shell and should be thanked for revealing new spaces
to us.
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