The chamber music repertoire consists so heavily of compositions for
piano and strings that any opportunity to hear wind instruments brought
into the mix deserves serious consideration. Yesterday afternoon at the
Old First Church, the Old First Concerts series provided three
offerings of wind instruments in chamber music. Two of these, composed
respectively by Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms, required a
trio of clarinet, cello, and piano. The remaining work, by the
contemporary German composer Karl Michael Komma, required the somewhat
rarer combination of bassoon, cello, and piano. All three works thus
constituted a shift in perspective on the traditional piano trio genre.
Indeed,
the first time I ever heard Beethoven's Opus 11 trio in B-flat major,
it was performed by the Beaux Arts Trio with the clarinet part replaced
by violinist Isidore Cohen. Several years passed before I had an
opportunity to hear the clarinet version, and the difference was
striking. According to Alexander Wheelock Thayer's biography, the work
grew out of a request in 1798 from a clarinet player identified only as
"Beer" (followed by a question mark). The final movement is a set of
variations on a theme from the opera L'Amor marinaro by Joseph Weigl, apparently at Beer's suggestion. This movement is preceded by an Allegro con brio and an Adagio.
Chronologically,
the trio is situated in the same time frame as the three Opus 10 piano
sonatas, which, in the past, I have discussed as prime examples of
Beethoven's capacity for wit.
That wit is definitely present in this trio; but now the light touch
of the piano (very much in the spirit of the sonatas) contends with a
clarinet voice that runs its own gamut from gentle through perky to
downright rambunctious. Between these contrasting voices we have a
cello part that alternates between participating in conversations over
the thematic material and providing continuo support.
Yesterday
afternoon's performers assumed these roles with a style that did full
justice to Beethoven's compositional imagination. Dmitriy Cogan brought
just the right touch to his keyboard, keeping control over all the
light-hearted throw-away gestures that spice up the piano part. Jerome
Simas recognized the full gamut of those clarinet moods, delivering them
all with some of the cleanest sounds I have heard for some time.
Rebecca Rust then supported these two performers with a
more-than-capable approach to her double-duty assignment.
These
same performers concluded the program with Brahms' Opus 114 A minor
trio. To say that this differs from the Beethoven as night from day is
slightly more than metaphorical. Beethoven was just beginning to
establish his reputation in 1798. On the other hand Brahms composed his
trio in 1890. This was a time when he had been ready to give up
composing until he met Richard Mühlfeld,
clarinetist with the Meiningen orchestra. This trio turned out to be
the first of four works composed for Mühlfeld, the others being the Opus
115 quintet and the two Opus 120 sonatas. All of these compositions
have a sense of twilight about them, not only through the use of minor
keys but also in a gentleness of rhetoric that can easily be taken as a
valedictory reflection on past experiences. Cogan, Simas, and Rust had
no trouble accommodating this rhetorical shift, providing a reading of
old Brahms that was just as stimulating as their approach to the younger
Beethoven.
Komma's composition on the program offered a
significant contrast to the more traditional offerings of Beethoven and
Brahms. In this case the wind instrument was a bassoon, performed by
Friedrich Edelmann; and the 1981 composition, Sapphische Strophen,
was a music interpretation of texts from the Greek lyric poet Sappho.
Sappho's work comes to us today only in fragments (as illustrated
above), only one of which offered a complete poem; and Komma took a
highly impressionistic approach to the fragments he selected. He
included the texts in his score but did not require that they be
delivered as part of the performance. He apparently studied them in the
original Greek, and the program notes provided both his German
translation and an English translation of his German. At least one of
Komma's settings reflected the rhythms in which the original Greek text
would have been declaimed. However, for all the scholarly baggage that
he brought to his work, the result was a highly affecting delivery of
seven glances into Sappho's world. Edelmann, Cogan, and Rust seemed to
have internalized Komma's impressions, rendering them with a clear
rhetoric that spoke perfectly well for itself. The afternoon thus made
for a combination of old and new that was as striking as the combination
of Beethoven's youth with Brahms' age.
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