Three Centuries of Chamber Music at Davies

1872 photograph of Johannes Brahms (photographer unknown, public domain from Wikimedia Commons)

Yesterday afternoon Davies Symphony Hall hosted the latest performance of chamber music by members of the San Francisco Symphony. This was a “three centuries” program presenting music composed in the nineteenth, twentieth, and 21st centuries. The earliest work on the program was Johannes Brahms’ Opus 60, the last of his three piano quartets, composed in the key of C minor. The most recent was a performance of tracks from Last Leaf, an album of a diversity of Nordic selections (some traditional) recorded by the Danish String Quartet. The first half of the program present two twentieth-century works composed within a year of each other. The opening selection was Steve Reich’s 1973 “Music for Pieces of Wood,” followed by an octet composed by Jean Françaix in 1972.

I was particularly drawn to that octet. Françaix was one of Nadia Boulanger’s pupils; and, on the basis of the few performances I have heard of his compositions, I would say that he has a rhetorical upbeat. Given the experiences of my past visits to France, I would postulate that such an upbeat was conceived to reflect the devil-may-care disposition of a flâneur. That disposition was particularly reflected in the wind performances by clarinet (Carey Bell), bassoon (Joshua Elmore), and horn (Michael Stevens). The richness of that disposition made the perfect complement to the engaging abstraction of the opening selection, “Music for Pieces of Wood,” composed by Steve Reich and performed by five musicians, each with his own pair of claves.

In the second half I did not quite know what to make of Last Leaf; but the performance by the string quartet of violinists Chen Zhao and Polina Sedukh, Christina King on viola, and cellist Davis You definitely held my attention. Nevertheless, the Brahms quartet was high point of my afternoon; and the ensemble of violinist Jessie Fellows, Katie Kadarauch on viola, cellist Anne Richardson, and Yuhsin Galaxy Su at the piano could not have been more engaging. Brahms almost always has me leaving any performance with a bit of zip in my walk!