Monday, March 2, 2020

Klein and Krása Revisited at the Mishkan

The timing for the second concert in the 21st season of the Music in the Mishkan chamber music series could not have been better. Yesterday afternoon’s program, entitled Czech It Out, provided the rare opportunity to revisit seldom-performed music, which had presented exactly one week earlier in a San Francisco Symphony chamber music recital prepared in conjunction with the Violins of Hope project. Violinist Raushan Akhmedyarova, violist Adam Smyla, and cellist Barbara Bogatin presented three pieces were written by two Czech composers, both of whom were actively involved in the cultural life of the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

All of those three pieces almost filled the first half of the Czech It Out program, performed this time by violinist (and Music Director) Randall Weiss, violist Patricia Whaley, and cellist Victoria Ehrlich. The program began with Gideon Klein’s 1944 string trio (which had preceded the intermission in Davies); and the Mishkan intermission was preceded by the same two pieces by Hans Krása that had followed the Davies intermission. This time, however, the vigorous dance movement “Tanec” preceded the coupling of a passacaglia and fugue, which had been the prior selection in Davies.

This turned out to be a change for the better. At Davies “Tanec” had provided what amounted to comic relief after the intense and often sinister darkness of the chromaticism in the theme shared by both the passacaglia and the fugue subject. However, as Weiss observed before playing the Krása selections, the “Tanec” theme found its way into both the passacaglia and the fugue, adding a rhetorical dimension to that coupling that had not registered as effectively in Davies.

The first half of Weiss’ program included one selection by a third Theresienstadt composer, Zikmund Schul. Schul arrived in Theresienstadt on November 30, 1941 and died there of tuberculosis on June 2, 1944, making him one of the few Theresienstadt prisoners not to be transferred to a death camp. One of his earliest Theresienstadt compositions was a pairing of Hasidic dances scored for viola and cello. Yesterday afternoon Weiss performed the upper voice on violin, joined by Ehrlich on cello.

This made for ingenious programming. For all the darkness associated with Theresienstadt, there was a ray of light that began with the Moravian folk song that occupies the middle movement of Klein’s trio, runs through Schul’s two dances, and then celebrates one last burst of energy in “Tanec.” This may not have occluded the overall darkness of the Theresienstadt legacy, but it allowed at least one upbeat thread to weave its way through that legacy.

The entire program was dedicated to the memory of one of this concert series’ earliest supporters, Sam Haber. Haber himself was a musician with a particular love of the violin-viola duos of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In his memory the intermission was followed by Weiss and Whaley playing the Adagio movement from the K. 424 duo in B-flat major. The program then returned to “Czech territory” with a performance of Ernst von Dohnányi’s Opus 10 serenade in C major, composed in 1902.

This amounted to upbeat compensation for all of the darkness that pervaded the first half of the program. It was also a piece that found favor in the chamber music repertoire of violinist Jascha Heifetz, who recorded it in 1941 with violist William Primrose and cellist Emanuel Feuermann. Back when I first began my writing, I used to encounter it frequently among the students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; but Dohnányi seems to have lost popularity among the “current administration.”

By way of conclusion, I found myself reflecting on an amusing sidebar while listening to Opus 10. I realized that my acquaintance with it had a strong connection to the West Coast, probably thanks to Heifetz living in California. When I lived on the East Coast, my only exposure to Dohnányi came form his Opus 25 “Variations on a Nursery Tune,” through which I first came to appreciate the composer’s sense of humor. Did the Opus 10 serenade not go down well with the stuffy chamber music set in cities like New York, Boston, and Baltimore?

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