As Doris Fukawa, Ensemble Programs Director for Summer Music West
2009, observed in introducing this afternoon's program at the San
Francisco Conservatory of Music, the performance of chamber music is a
major challenge for the young. Her comparison of chamber music to
basketball was appropriate: Every individual counts, but counts not
only for individual actions but also for how those actions mesh
appropriately with the actions of others. At the risk of sounding too
clinical, this means that proper performance has much to do with child
development. Soloists can begin to emerge as they acquire the skills
for the technical mastery of their respective instruments, but the
development of the listening skills required for chamber music
takes place along a cognitive path that is quite separate from that of
the physical capacity for technical development. That latter
development can be enhanced through both exposure to others playing
chamber music and efforts to play it oneself, but the nature of
listening is so poorly understood that few educators have the gifts to
cultivate it in others. Those of us who accept the theories of Piaget
do not even know whether or not there are "stepping stones" along the
path to acquiring listening skills, subgoals that must be achieved as
prerequisite to the final objective.
I write all this as
preface to the obvious recognition that there was considerable variation
of skill in this afternoon's recital. To some extent that variation
was instrument-related. The wind players, in general, seemed more
capable of managing the "dual awareness" of both the music they were
playing and what their fellow performers were doing. The string
players, on the other hand, seemed to be at an earlier stage of getting
their fingers around the notes; and their awareness tended to be the
weakest. In between we had the pianists, some of whom never really
connected while others "got it" with truly compelling performances. It
thus seems appropriate to focus on the positive surprises, rather than
the weaker cases that may ultimately be resolved as child development
runs its course.
Most impressive was probably a performance of the
first movement of the G minor piano quartet by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(K. 478). The students' attentiveness to both the music and each other
was all the more outstanding in light of the fact that the viola part
was taken by a violin student (playing a violin). Even with this
acoustic shortcoming, each part in the quartet spoke with its own
characteristic voice, even if the piano tended to reflect Mozart's own
inclination to show off at the keyboard.
The pianist took on even
more virtuosic demands at the end of the program with a shift to the
two-piano repertoire. In this case the music was the set of variations
that Witold Lutoslawski composed on the same theme that Sergei
Rachmaninoff had used for his Paganini rhapsody. Lutoslawski composed
these variations in 1941 to play with his friend and fellow composer Andrzej Panufnik while they were trying to survive during the Second World War by performing in Warsaw cafés.
Needless to say, café audiences tended to be more interested in
entertainment than in musical sophistication; so it is reasonable to
assume that Lutoslawski wrote the music to twit Rachmaninoff, whose
rhapsody had already achieved warhorse status. His Warsaw audiences
probably consumed his low humor (with or without the high virtuosity)
with gusto. Thus, if the summer students were to be criticized at all,
it would be for approach this music too seriously; but this can be
forgiven, since getting through Lutoslawski's welter of notes at all is a
pretty serious challenge! Whether or not they appreciated the
composer's sense of humor, they knew enough to bring the program to its
conclusion with an impressive display of fireworks.
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