September 21, 2009: Just-so stories about American music

One might thank that S.F.P.Q. has a peculiarly bipolar relationship in the matter of informing their audience.  The program notes for their Old First Concerts recital at Old First Church yesterday afternoon seemed to assume that those initials needed no explanation, which apparently puzzled some of those around me.  Given the composition of the ensemble (Robin Mayforth, violin;  Elizabeth Prior Runnicles, viola;  Angela Lee, cello;  Avi Downes, piano), "San Francisco Piano Quartet" would be the most viable hypothesis.  More perplexing was the title of the entire program:  Six Degrees:  Dvorák—Coming to America.  In this case, however, the event was structured to enable enlightenment to come through a lecture that Downes had prepared, which would be illustrated by the seven compositions on the program by Antonín Dvorák and six American (one by adoption) composers.

S.F.P.Q. is a skilled ensemble.  Listening to them is a real pleasure, even for those who may not share my almost obsessive interest in the piano quartet repertoire.  It is thus a pity that this opportunity to hear some really good musicians perform some really interesting music was seriously marred by a lecture that fumbled around with its points, ultimately running the gamut from ill-conceived to flat-out-wrong.  Had the objective been to demonstrate the impact that Dvorák had on the evolution of "American music as we know it" (rather than the other-way-around story of how he was influenced by the music he heard in America), then that objective could have been achieved simply by juxtaposing his music with representative examples;  but even the examples selected for the concert program did not serve the task of representation very well at all.

This is not the proper place to pick apart every last detail in the flawed reasoning behind this offering.  More important is that Dvorák's Opus 87 piano quartet in E-flat major received an attentive performance and did not suffer from having its first three movements open the program while saving the final movement to conclude the recital.  Similarly, although the logic behind including Aaron Copland's piano quartet may have been poorly conceived, it was more than worth while to have the opportunity to hear such a fine performance of even one (Adagio Serio) of its three movements.  Even more interesting was the opportunity to hear Runnicles perform the Impetuoso movement from Rebecca Clarke's viola sonata.  The occasion might have been even more fascinating had some material by Lewis Foreman that appeared on the Saint Paul Sunday Web site been included as introduction:

Clarke came to celebrity with her Viola Sonata, which was written while touring in 1918 and 1919, being started in Honolulu and finished in Detroit. She submitted it to the international competition for chamber music run by Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge at her 1919 Berkshire Chamber Music Festival, held at her New England home near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The 73 works submitted were judged anonymously and two scores for viola and piano tied—[Ernest] Bloch's Suite and Clarke's Sonata. The prize went to Bloch on Coolidge's casting vote. It is reported that when Clarke was revealed as a woman of 33 it caused considerable comment. ('You should have seen their faces!' wrote Coolidge.)

Ultimately, however, this was a recital in which the music should have been allowed to speak for itself;  or, as Frank Zappa put it less politely in the self-deprecating title of one of his albums, Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar!

September 19, 2009: A density of notes

Last night's piano recital by Joel Fan in the Old First Concerts series at Old First Church offered a somewhat unconventional combination of composers in an equally unconventional order.  The major work before the intermission was Elliott Carter's only piano sonata (first completed in 1946 and then revised in 1982), preceded by the third piano sonata in A minor, Opus 28, which Sergei Prokofiev began in 1907 but only completed in 1917, after his move from Russia to Paris.  The second half of the program also concluded with a piano sonata, this time Frédéric Chopin's second in B-flat minor, Opus 35 (best known as the "Funeral March"), preceded by William Bolcom's "Nine New Bagatelles."  If these composers have anything in common, it would probably be their capacity for writing high-density streams of notes;  and, in a recital of approximately 100 minutes (including the intermission), Fan may have set a record for average number of notes played per minute.

He certainly had the technical chops for the demands of this music.  Furthermore, now that all the celebrations for Carter's hundredth birthday have passed, performances of his music are as hard to encounter as they used to be.  However, I am not sure that Fan was able to get past the challenges of dexterity and capture the features that earn this sonata a more significant place in the recital repertoire.  Most important is that, even in this early period, Carter was already experimenting with new ways to work with time.  He also was clearly interested in the sonority of the piano itself, particularly in his exploitation of sympathetic vibration as a means of sustaining sounds.  At the highest level of architecture, that sense of sonority serves the primary motif that pervades the entire sonata, which evokes the tolling of bells, presumably to honor those who fell in the Second World War.  Fan explained some (but not all) of this through introductory remarks;  but ultimately all that came through was his gift for maintaining control over the flood of notes that Carter had summoned.  In that respect the performance was not that different from the Prokofiev performance that preceded it, except that Prokofiev's logic was compressed into a single continuous movement.  Similarly, the Chopin reading was all about technical proficiency, which was certainly impressive but never got at the music behind the technique, so to speak.  Thus, his command of the gradual crescendo in the funeral march movement was impeccable;  but the resulting roar from the piano seemed at cross-purposes with the funereal intent, rather than in support of it.

In the presence of such monuments, the Bolcom bagatelles were short but fascinating.  Fan reviewed their cloying titles (which really should have been included in the program) for the audience, giving each a brief explanation.  These works also imposed some significant technical demands, but Fan seemed more at home tapping into the personal quality each one conveyed.  At the end of the evening, this was the experience that left me hungry for a second listening.

Fan offered two encores, both of which seem to have come from his new West of the Sun CD.  I was most interested in the first of these encores, a dance setting by the Brazilian composer Ernesto Nazareth.  I was first exposed to Nazareth because Darius Milhaud had appropriated some of his "hits" for his "Cinéma-Symphonie sur des Airs Sud-Américains," "Le Bœuf sur le Toit."  Since I am currently working on Milhaud's four-hand version of his score with a neighbor, I am more curious about his source material;  and Fan's selection of Nazareth for an encore did much for my curiosity.

August 31, 2009: The clarinet and bassoon in chamber music

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.

August 29, 2009: Unfamiliar British music

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.

August 15, 2009: Music: the next generation

The last time I wrote about Frederick Rzewski was when Carlos Avila concluded his Noontime Concerts™ recital at Old St. Mary's Cathedral with "Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues" two months ago.  Last night Rzewski was again selected to conclude a program, this time an evening of chamber music at the Old First Concerts series, at the Old First Church;  but the context was significantly different.  While Avila chose Rzewski to complete a three-century traversal of the piano repertoire, Rzewski's "Coming Together" was the oldest work on the Old First program.  Indeed, Rzewski was very much the "grand old man" of the evening, more than a dozen years older than Paul Dresher (whose "Blue Diamonds" concluded the first half of the program) and almost 45 years younger than composer Max Stoffregen, whose "the delicate flow of vines" was performed and who was one of the performers of "Coming Together."  If, as the title of the program suggested, the theme of the evening was "the next generation" of music, then it might be fair to acknowledge Rzewski as a progenitor of that generation.

Were that to be the case, however, Rzewski's "lineage" would be defined more through its new approach to musical rhetoric than to the "utterances" delivered through that rhetoric.  Avila's recital provided me with my first opportunity to sink my writing chops into Rzewski;  and I did so by comparing his "agitprop" and "folk" styles.  Avila had chosen to present the "folk Rzewski;"  "Coming Together" offers an excellent example of the "agitprop Rzewski."  It was written in response to the 1971 Attica Prison riot, providing a musical setting for the narration of the text of a letter by prisoner Sam Melville:

I think the combination of age and a greater coming together is responsible for the speed of the passing time.  It's six months now, and I can tell you truthfully, few periods in my life have passed so quickly.  I am in excellent physical and emotional health.  There are doubtless subtle surprises ahead, but I feel secure and ready.  As lovers will contrast their emotions in times of crisis so am I dealing with my environment.  In the indifferent brutality, the incessant noise, the experimental chemistry of food, the ravings of lost hysterical men, I can act with clarity and meaning.  I am deliberate, sometimes even calculating, seldom employing histrionics except as a test of the reactions of others.  I read much, exercise, talk to guards and inmates, feeling for the inevitable direction of my life.

This text captures both an enumeration of motives and a definition of the means for declaring the riot.  When the declaration came, it was far from a "subtle" surprise;  nor was there anything subtle about the brutal reaction directed by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller.  Rzewski decided to use music to create a sense of the tension that was building around Melville when he wrote this letter.

Rhetorically, Rzewski developed his own approach to what Philip Glass has called "music with repetitive structures."  There is a single melodic line in eighth notes based on a core of motivic fragments deployed through different iterations and permutations.  This melody begins with a single instrument, while the rest of the ensemble provides a background of overlapping sustained tones;  but, as the composition progresses, these accompanying instruments abandon their respective parts and join the melodic line, thus embodying in musical terms the "greater coming together" of Melville's text.  One thus experiences the coming to a boil of the spirit behind the Attica riot;  and Rzewski then restrains from representing the boil-over of the riot itself.

"Coming Together" is composed for "speaker, bass instruments, and ensemble."  At this performance the speaker was Michael Mohammed and the instruments were two bass clarinets (Jonathan Russell and Jeff Anderle), violin (Alisa Rose), electric guitar (Brian Dowdy), piano (Matthew McCright), and Moog synthesizer (Max Stoffregen).  I first heard this work on a Hungaroton recording of the Group 180 ensemble (having learned about them from a lecture given by Steve Reich), on which the work was performed by thirteen musicians;  and "Coming Together" is one of several works for which Rzewski is flexible about instrumentation.  What matters most is that "coming together" effect.  While the recording prepared me for the overall experience, nothing could prepare me for the physicality of the effect itself in "live" performance;  and this ensemble, apparently organized by Russell and McCright, delivered that effect with all the compulsion it deserved.

McCright also performed the Dresher "Blue Diamonds" piano solo, an extended single-movement work lasting almost one-third of an hour.  Like some of Dresher's other works, this reflects an Asian influence;  but this is due primarily to the predominance of pentatonic passages.  For all I know the real influence may have been Joseph Yasser, who believed that the diatonic major scale was basically a pentatonic scale with two "chromatic" pitches added, the first step in an "evolutionary" path that culminated in the full chromatic scale.  In this case the rhetoric relies heavily on rhythm, particularly through the interplay of polyrhythms.  In his introductory remarks Dresher spoke of a connection to Frédéric Chopin, although I found my own orientation more from the "Pagodes" (which are actually Indonesian stupas) of Claude Debussy.  Whether or not this had to do with the score itself or with the Debussy-like touch that McCright brought to this performance, I cannot tell.  This is a work that deserves more than one listening, and nothing would please me more than opportunities to hear other pianists add this work to their repertoires.

Indeed, little can be said about the most recent works on the program (by Ryan Brown, Nigel Westlake, Max Stoffregen Luciano Chessa, and Russell himself), simply because these were all "first tastes."  I might say that some left more of a taste for subsequent performance than others;  but "first appearances" in the concert repertoire are easily deceiving.  Nevertheless, Russell and McCright did a great service by providing opportunity for these "first tastes."  At the very least I now have some names that will register with me the next time I see a program announced on which they appear.

June 27, 2009: "Golden years" of French masters

"French Masters' Golden Years" was the title of the program cellist Sarah Hong prepared for her recital in the Old First Concerts series, at the Old First Church, last night.  Those "golden years" basically covered the first two decades of the twentieth century, thus fitting very comfortably into that period of French history captured in Marcel Proust's cycle of seven novels, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.  The "masters" represented by the recital were (in the chronological order of the compositions performed) Ernest Chausson, Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and Gabriel Fauré (also represented by an encore).

For Proust the violin played a pivotal role in the unfolding of his plot, particularly in the form of a violin sonata by the fictional composer Vinteuil.  However, there are many ways in which the richer and darker character of the cello is more suitable to Proust's settings that embody both the elegance and the decadence of his age.  Proust dealt with these contrasting characteristics with abundant irony, and that sense of irony is very much present in Debussy's 1915 cello sonata.  Debussy had considered titling this sonata "Pierrot fâché avec la lune" [Pierrot annoyed with the moon];  and the program notes (which did not get this title quite right) speculated that the work may have been inspired by Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, composed three years earlier.  Debussy certainly matches Schoenberg irony for irony and does so without ever leaving the sphere of conventional tonality.  Thus, it could be that Debussy was also "defending the old ways," leading me to suggest on my blog that a better title for the work might have been "Debussy fâché avec Schoenberg!"

This sonata was the first of three chamber music sonatas that Debussy composed near the end of his life.  Two years later, Fauré, now in his seventies, composed the first of two of his own cello sonatas (Opus 109).  When the San Francisco Symphony performed the music of both of these composers on the same program last April, I described Fauré "as an impressionist in contrast with a more fauvist Debussy."  From this point of view, Fauré's sonata begins with what sounds like a deliberate venture into fauvism (provoked by Debussy's earlier sonata?), while the remaining two movements almost seem to reconcile the opposing styles.  None of Debussy's fâcherie is present, however, nor is there any edge of irony.  Rather, there may have been a few hints of nostalgic reflection.  Some of that reflection may have been reinforced by the decision to perform a transcription (probably by Pablo Casals) of one of his early songs, "Après un Rêve," Opus 7, Number 1, as an encore.

Chronologically, Ravel's A minor piano trio predates both of these sonatas.  Indeed, it was completed in September of 1914;  and Ravel had apparently worked quickly to finish the work in order to be available to enlist in the army.  (World War I had broken out in August.)  The trio is dedicated to André Gedalge, who was not only Ravel's counterpoint teacher but also the author of a text that is still accepted as a leading authority on the composition of fugue.  That dedication is most manifest in the passacaglia of the third movement, which weaves material from earlier movements into its successive elaborations on an eight-bar bass line.

For the performance of this trio, Hong and her accompanist, Makiko Ooka, were joined by violinist Fumino Ando.  They found an excellent balance between Ravel's technical demands and the high level of expressiveness in each of his four movements (as Hong had done in her performances of the two sonatas).  For all the haste of his effort, the resulting trio is Ravel at his most stimulating;  and the energy of the three performers added exhilaration to the stimulation.  The one "quiet moment" of the evening came when Hong chose to perform Chausson's Opus 39 "pièce," very much a reflection on the short ternary-form compositions of nineteenth-century German chamber music.  It was composed in 1899, the year of Chausson's death and is very much a farewell to nineteenth-century values as those "golden years" of the rest of Hong's program were about to begin.  If the best concert programs are the ones that introduce us to music history without being pedantic, then last night's recital was definitely one of those programs.

June 6, 2009: An alternative string quartet

The lead instrument of the Luna Nova Quartet is a mandolin, played by Ben Brussell, who also seems to manage (and in some cases arrange) the repertoire.  The rest of the group is a conventional string trio of violin (Candy Sanderson), viola (Linda Green), and cello (Alex Kelly).  Their repertoire consists of arrangements of folk sources, both sacred and secular, along with original works inspired by those sources.  In many ways they do for folk music what the Turtle Island String Quartet did for bebop jazz;  so it was no surprise that their repertoire included a cello solo, "Julie-O," composed by Turtle Island cellist Mark Summer.  It also includes two movements from the first string quartet (1983) by Peter Schickele (without his P. D. Q. Bach persona), in which Brussell plays the first violin part on his mandolin (apparently with Schickele's approval).

The arrangement of folk material for a chamber music setting goes back at least to the eighteenth century, when George Thomson commissioned arrangements of his seemingly inexhaustible collection of folksongs from the British Isles from composers such as Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven.  Some of the sources of that material surfaced in Luna Nova's recital last night at Old First Church, having come to the United States in the early days of colonization.  However, the Luna Nova approach is more casual than a Haydn or Beethoven recital;  and that atmosphere is maintained by Brussell chatting up the audience between performances.  Most of the offerings were pleasantly upbeat, although my patience with Jay Unger's "Ashokan Farewell" has run out along with my tolerance of just about anything associated with Ken Burns.  Luna Nova is at its best when all four members get to throw their energy into what they play, and that was best appreciated when they wrapped up the evening with Ervin T. Rouse's train-imitating "Orange Blossom Special."

May 25, 2009: Warm Brahms on a cold afternoon

Memorial Day weekend came to San Francisco with a preview of the cold and grey days we usually expect in August;  but the Old First Concerts series, at the Old First Church, provided an excellent refuge from the cold with a chamber music recital by the MusicAEterna trio.  This piano trio was founded in 1999 by Aenea Mizushima Keyes, who studied violin with Dorothy Delay and composition with Meyer Kupferman at Sarah Lawrence College and is currently on the faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.  This recital provided Keyes, in the company of cellist Monica Scott and pianist Miles Graber, to exercise both of her skills in a program entitled "Past to Present."

From the past Johannes Brahms provided the most warmth with his Opus 8 B major piano trio.  This work was published in his early twenties but almost entirely reworked 35 years later.  The most important addition to the later version is the third Adagio movement, which I previously described as foreshadowing his explorations of the intermezzo form in his late piano compositions.  MusicAEterna offered a performance that captured both the youthful exuberance of the initial effort and the more forward-looking speculations of the later.

As composer Keyes was represented by a short suite entitled Snapshots from Japan, reflecting on her personal experiences in that country and inspired by ukiyo-e woodblock prints.  Each movement is an impression of a different artist.  Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's movement is entitled "GHOST," evoking his Thirty-Six Ghosts series, and is coupled with the concept of sorrow.  This is followed by "GARDEN" and the concept of balance as a reflection on Kitagawa Utamaro, best known for his studies of women.  The final movement, entitled "FESTIVAL" and coupled with the concept of joy, honors Katsushika Hokusai, whose "Great Wave off Kanagawa" in his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series is said to have inspired the composition of Claude Debussy's La Mer.  With little familiarity with the source material for Keyes' inspirations, I found it difficult to form many impressions, although I was left wondering whether the scurrying sounds of the first movement may have been triggered by the rats in one of the prints from Thirty-Six Ghosts (from Wikipedia):

This work was preceded by "Between Tides," by Toru Takemitsu (who had also approached the subject of ghosts in his soundtrack for Masaki Kobayashi's 1964 film of four stories from Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan collection).  I have been listening to Takemitsu's music for about forty years and have been struck by the diversity of his approaches.  His orchestral sounds can be as spare as those of Anton Webern or as rich as those of Alban Berg.  However, this may have been my first encounter with his chamber music;  and the sonorities tended towards the richer end of the spectrum.  A meditative, somewhat static, quality is established through a modest repertoire of motifs, each of which returns over different intervals of time, thus providing an acoustic representation of tidal ebb and flow that captures both the predictability and unpredictability of the physical process.

The program began with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 564 G major piano trio, the last of his compositions in this genre.  Mozart has a particular skill in capturing a sense of intimate conversation in his chamber music, even when an ensemble like a piano trio imposes major questions of balance.  Unfortunately, the senses of both conversation and intimacy seemed to elude this particular performance, leaving me to wonder if Mozart had been neglected after all the attention given to Takemitsu and Brahms (as well as Keyes' own composition).