SFS: More Imaginative Chamber Music

This morning, when I was reviewing past articles about performances in Davies Symphony Hall to prepare for this one, I noticed a preference for the adjective “imaginative.” That was certainly the case last month with the chamber music recital presented by members of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). This month’s offering, presented yesterday afternoon, was right up there were no shortage of imaginative takes on the genre.

The program began with a composition by one of the leading double bass players of the nineteenth century, Giovanni Bottesini. I was fortunate to learn much about this instrument through recitals given by Gary Karr, back when I was on the “other coast.” He would often introduce a performance with some verbal patter, saying things about his instrument like “You just want to hug it!” and “Think of it as chocolate!” Yesterday’s offering presented four bassists: Charles Chandler, Bowen Ha, Orion Miller, and Daniel G. Smith (SFS Associate Principal).

Their selection was “Passione amorosa,” composed by Bottesini for two basses and piano. The quartet arrangement was by Klaus Trumpf. The performance almost immediately took me back to the high spirits of Karr’s recitals, complete with the tongue-in-cheek qualities behind those spirits. Bottesini’s virtuoso demands were positively jaw-dropping; but all four of the players delivered a solid and confident command of every challenge that the composer raised. This could not have been a better way to prepare audience attention for the entire afternoon of chamber music.

Indeed, Paul Schoenfield’s “Café Music” was the perfect successor to “Passione amorosa.” If Bottesini was jaw-dropping, Schoenfield was just plain raucous. He wrote “Café Music” as a reflection on a night when he was the “house pianist” at Murray’s Restaurant in Minneapolis, determined to make sure that the “dinner music” for the guests was not just “background music!” He distilled those memories into a three-movement composition for piano trio, performed yesterday by violinist Melissa Kleinbart, Amos Yang on cello, and pianist John Wilson. They delivered a solid account of every one of Schoenfield’s twists and turns without ever short-changing the madcap spirit of the rhetoric.

Portrait photograph of Bohuslav Martinů taken in 1945 (source unknown, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Czech Republic license, from a Wikimedia Commons Web page)

The second half of the program took on a somewhat more sober tone. It began with a nonet composed in 1959 by Bohuslav Martinů. His instrumentation supplements a wind quintet with violin, viola, cello, and bass. This makes for a rich blend of sonorities, which figure significantly in the composer’s approach to overall rhetoric. The entire composition follows a “standard” three-movement framework: fast (Poco Allegro)-slow (Andante)-fast (Allegretto). This makes for a rich palette of sonorities complemented by the inventiveness of the composer’s thematic vocabulary. The wind players for this performance were Blair Francis Paponiu on flute, oboist Russ de Luna, Matthew Griffith on clarinet, bassoonist Justin Cummings, and Jessica Valieri on horn. They were joined by violinist Chen Zhao, Matthew Young on viola, cellist Davis You, and Bowen Ha on bass. This year has gotten off to a good start for Martinů with Steven Isserlis’ recital this past February but also because he was not overlooked in the recorded repertoire of David Oistrakh, recently reissued by Warner Classics.

The program concluded with Dmitri Shostakovich’s third string quartet, his Opus 73 in F major. This was composed not long after the end of World War II. His first major post-war undertaking was his Opus 70 (ninth) symphony in E-flat major, whose high spirits did not go down well with the Soviet authorities. To convince those authorities that the quartet would be a more “sobering” reflection on the past war, he provided them with “titles” for the quartet’s five movements:

1. Blithe ignorance of the future cataclysm
2. Rumblings of unrest and anticipation
3. Forces of war unleashed
4. In memory of the dead
5. The eternal question: why? and for what?

These titles were not included in yesterday afternoon’s program book, which is probably just as well! This was quartet music to be taken on its own terms; and my only annotation in my program book was for the final movement: “Fugue of sorts!”

Once again, the afternoon, taken as a whole, was a satisfying one, combining fond memories of the past with new adventures in discovery.