The Tilden Trio consists of two members of the San Francisco Symphony
(violinist Sarn Oliver and cellist Peter Wyrick) and pianist June Choi
Oh, who has performed in the San Francisco Symphony Chamber Series. To
celebrate the 21st anniversary of the Noontime Concerts™ recital series
at Old St. Mary's Cathedral, they offered a rich pairing of Ludwig van
Beethoven (the E-flat major trio, Opus 70, Number 2) and Robert Schumann
(the D minor trio Opus 63). The performance took a bit longer than
most of the events in this series, but it was certainly worth the
commitment of another quarter hour or so.
I remember an
occasion from my student days when an entire composition lesson was
devoted to how Beethoven could unfold an entire movement from a
seemingly insignificant motif of one or two intervals. The example
given in that lesson was the first movement of the sixth symphony
("Pastoral") in F major. The opus number for this symphony is 68; and
it was published in 1809, the same year as the two Opus 70 trios. It
was thus with a pleasant sense of déjà vu that I realized how the
opening movement of Opus 70, Number 2 also emerges from an equally
minimal seed. That revelation is most apparent when one can listen to
each of the three voices of the trio contribute to that emergence in its
own characteristic way.
Such listening is not always an easy
matter in Old St. Mary's, whose acoustics impose challenges to the
proper balancing of those voices. Two months ago
pianist Miles Graber dealt with balancing the voices of Johannes
Brahms' C minor piano quartet, Opus 60, by having the violin and viola
stand behind the piano (whose lid was at half-stick height) with the
cello sitting beside them. In today's performance Oh raised the lid of
her piano to full-stick height but placed it an angle such that she
faced the audience from the northwest compass point. Oliver and Wyrick
were then placed in front of the piano, slightly into the sanctuary
aisle, with Oliver standing and Wyrick seated. This approach to balance
turned out to be as effective as Graber's experiment; but that may
have been, in part, because Oh had excellent control of her dynamics,
always careful not to overwhelm her colleagues but allowing the piano to
vent its energetic bursts when the score called for them.
Indeed,
this is one of those scores that calls for a lot from its performers.
Beyond the inventiveness of the first movement, the third movement
replaces the usual scherzo with a ternary form that may well have been a
trigger for Franz Schubert's shorter ternary pieces, such as those he
classified as "intermezzo." The second and fourth movements, on the
other hand, remind us that Beethoven could still demonstrate his sense
of wit even after his "Heiligenstadt Testament." (After all, his eighth symphony
was completed in 1812.) The Allegretto second movement reveals him
playing with extreme shifts of dynamics (which is why solving the
balance problem was so important), while the Allegro Finale presents
each player with a cadenza that sends them off "madly in all directions"
(as James Thurber once put it). Since the Finale follows sonata-form
conventions, this bit of lunacy comes back in the recapitulation, just
in case you did not get the joke the first time!
The Schumann trio
was an entirely different manner of beast, beginning with the
German-language tempo descriptions that could have come from the
literary side of the Sturm und Drang movement. More striking,
however, is that, in contrast to Beethoven's impeccable sense in the
timing of his points of closure, Schumann seems to be using this trio to
experiment with a literary technique that would only emerge a century
later, that of stream of consciousness. The Leidenschaft (passion) of
the first movement is one of restless energy (Energie) that resists
settling into closure at every turn; even the coda almost forcefully
resists letting go of what is now a dying energy, refusing the let the
movement come to a peaceful conclusion. This unsettling stream of
consciousness returns in the Langsam third movement, thus allowing the
more formally structured second and fourth movements to allow the ear to
settle into a more secure sense of regularity.
All of that
unsettling energy derives from the interplay of the three voices, so
once again the success of the performance depends heavily on getting the
balance to work. As with the Beethoven, the Tilden's experiment with
layout seems to have been successful. The clarity of the voices
reinforced that stream-of-consciousness spirit that motivates the first
and third movements and prepares the ear for the sense of release and
conclusion expressed in the alternating movements. There could be no
better way to celebrate a tradition of chamber music that is now 21
years old.
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