Stella Chen Returning to SF for Chamber Music

Cellist Brannon Cho, violinist Stella Chan, and violist Matthew Lipman (from the Groupmuse Web page for their coming recital)

Next month violinist and Bay Area native Stella Chan will return to San Francisco for the third program in the 2026 season presented by Chamber Music San Francisco. Unless I am mistaken, she was last in town in July of 2024, which she came to Davies Symphony Hall to make her debut as concerto soloist with the San Francisco Symphony. She will return next month as part of a trio, whose other members are violist Matthew Lipman and cellist Brannon Cho. The three of them have been performing as a trio since 2023.

They have prepared a “two centuries” program, which will be presented in reverse chronological order. The composer for the first half of the program will be Ernst von Dohnányi. His Opus 10 is a string trio, which was given its first performance in Vienna in 1904. The composer entitled the piece “Serenade,” and it consists of five movements. The second half of the program will be devoted to one of the major chamber music undertakings of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. His K. 563 divertimento in E-flat major is a six-movement composition, whose fourth movement is a set of seven variations on a theme in B-flat major.

The venue for this performance will be the Presidio Theater, which is located in the Presidio at 99 Moraga Avenue. This will be a Groupmuse event with a Web page for purchasing tickets. Ticket prices are $20 with the discounted $15 for Supermusers. The performance will begin at 3 p.m. on Sunday, March 8. Ticket sales will close at noon on Thursday, March 5.

[added 2/18, 6:35 a.m.: As of this writing, only four Groupmuse tickets are available. Remaining tickets will be sold through the Chamber Music San Francisco Web page. Ticket prices are $69 and $35.]

String Quartet to Join Ian Scarfe at Monument

Poster design for the performance being discussed, with photographs of the five performers (from the Groupmuse event page)

For this year’s summer performance in San Francisco, pianist Ian Scarfe, Director of the Trinity Alps Chamber Music Festival, will return to Monument SF. He will be joined by an ad hoc string quartet, whose members are his colleagues. The performers will be violinists Sam Weiser and Kevin Rogers, Julian Altmann on viola, and cellist Kendra Grittani. There will be six selections on the program, each by a different composer. Four of them will require the full quintet resources. One will be a movement from a piano quartet, and the other will be for string quartet, as well as the only work composed during the current century.

That quartet has become a familiar one for concert goers here in San Francisco. It is Jessie Montgomery’s “Strum,” an engaging study of the interplay between bowed and plucked passages. Those that follow performances in the Civic Center may recall that it was performed by the Calidore Quartet in Herbst Theatre this past March. Information is not currently available for which of the two violinists will contribute to the piano quartet, but the selection will be the third (Andante cantabile) movement from Robert Schumann’s Opus 47. The one multi-movement composition to be performed in its entirety will be Clara Schumann’s Opus 22, the set of three pieces given the title “Romances,” originally scored for violin and piano. The single-movement selections will be as follows:

• Ernst von Dohnányi: Piano Quintet, Opus 26, first movement
• Philip Glass: “Opening” from the Glassworks album
• Johannes Brahms: Piano Quintet, Opus 34, fourth movement (Finale)

Many readers probably know by now that the Monument event space is located in SoMa at 140 9th Street. This performance will begin at 7 p.m. on Sunday, June 22. As in the past, ticketing is being managed by Groupmuse, which has created a Web page for reservations.

Guarneri in the 20th Century: a Modest Proposal

As most readers will probably expect by now, my journey through the 49 CDs in the Sony Masterworks box set Guarneri Quartet: The Complete Recordings 1965–2005 concludes in the twentieth century. I must confess that I was more than a little disappointed at how modest this repertoire was. There are only four CDs, three of which are devoted to Hungarian composers. The one “outlier” is the French album, which consists of the usual coupling of the only quartets composed by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, respectively. These are satisfying accounts, but it would be fair to say that they do not rise above the many past listening experiences I have devoted to both of these French quartets.

Photograph of Ernst von Dohnányi, probably taken around 1905 (photographer unknown, public domain, from Wikimedia Commons)

The Hungarian side accounts for all six of the quartets composed by Béla Bartók. The remaining CD is sort of a “sandwich.” Zoltán Kodály’s Opus 10 (second) quartet is situated between the last two of the string quartets by Ernst von Dohnányi: Opus 15 in D-flat major and Opus 33 in A minor. Now those readers that have been following this site for some time may recall that my association of the complete canon of the Bartók quartets with the Juilliard String Quartet goes all the way back to my freshman year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a result, for better or worse, the three CDs in the Sony Classical anthology, Juilliard String Quartet: The Early Columbia Recordings 1949–56, have long served as my “gold standard.”

Mind you, I fondly appreciated the opportunity to listen to music by both Kodály and Dohnányi, simply because I encounter their works so seldom. However, Columbia released two different albums of the Bartók quartets (the second in stereo, to “compensate” for the first monaural version); and I gave both of those interpretations a generous amount of attention during my campus radio station days. Now Sony is responsible for recordings that were first released by both Columbia and RCA, responsible for both Juilliard and Guarneri, respectively. So I have a generous number of opportunities to enjoy Bartók’s quartets (including the Complete Edition of the composer’s music on Hungaroton); and I have every intention of giving equal attention to all of these sources in future listening encounters!

Guarneri Quartet: its 19th Century Comfort Zone

The above claim that the nineteenth century was the “comfort zone” of the Guarneri Quartet can be affirmed by the fact that the composers from that century account for the “lion’s share” of the 49 CDs in the Sony Masterworks box set, Guarneri Quartet: The Complete Recordings 1965–2005 (not including the previously reported releases of works by Franz Schubert). As might be guessed, primary attention goes to what may be called the “Schumann-Brahms axis,” given that some of the multiple-CD albums in the collection are devoted to “side-by-side” recordings of music by Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms. Brahms first met Robert and Clara Schumann in October of 1853, and he would maintain a relationship with Clara after Robert’s death. (Clara, in turn, would perform Brahms’ music in her recitals.)

Those “side-by-side” albums account for all of the quartets by both of the composers, as well as the album of the three Brahms piano quartets coupled with Schumann’s Opus 44 piano quintet. Many readers probably already know that Arnold Schoenberg was so taken with the first of these quartets, Opus 25 in G minor, that he orchestrated the score, hoping that the music would receive more attention. (That attention would benefit from George Balanchine decision to choreograph the Schoenberg version.) The pianist for these compositions is none other than Artur Rubinstein, who also joined the Guarneri in their recording of Brahms’ Opus 34 quintet in F minor. As far as the string quartets are concerned, it may will be the case that I have not encountered any of them since the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan celebrated the sesquicentenary of the birth of Johannes Brahms (born in 1833) with a marathon series of concerts covering all of his chamber music for piano and strings.

Photograph of Dvořák with his friends and family in New York (1893 photograph by unknown photographer, public domain, from Wikimedia Commons)

Antonín Dvořák receives just as much attention as Brahms in the Guarneri repertoire. Nevertheless, the account of string quartets is relatively sparse, perhaps under the assumption that only Opus 96 in F major, known as the “American” quartet, tended to draw audience enthusiasm. On the other hand, Rubinstein again appears as “guest artist for both the Opus 81 piano quintet in A major and the Opus 87 piano quartet in E-flat major. On the other hand, I have confess a fondness for the Opus 74 terzetto, which I came to know and love through another choreographer of Dvořák’s music, Antony Tudor. His use of Opus 74 near the beginning of Leaves are Fading was responsible for getting me hooked on future encounters with Dvořák’s chamber music for strings.

As might be guessed, the collection includes Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 20 octet in E-flat major, which was recorded during the Marlboro Music Festival. The Guarneri also recorded an early Mendelssohn quartet, Opus 13 in A minor, coupled with Edvard Grieg’s Opus 27 quartet in G minor. The only other composer to receive more than one CD is Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. His Opus 11 quartet is D major is coupled with Giuseppe Verdi’s E minor quartet. The other album is devoted entirely to the Opus 70 “Souvenir de Florence” sextet, which includes violist Boris Kroyt and Mischa Schneider on cello.

There is one more Rubinstein album. He joins the ensemble in performing Gabriel Fauré’s Opus 15 piano quartet in C minor. This early work in the Fauré canon is coupled with one of the latest, his Opus 121 string quartet. Finally, the quartet accounts for the latter end of the nineteenth century with an album that couples two “second quartets.” These are the D major quartet by Alexander Borodin and the Opus 15 (second) quartet by Ernst von Dohnányi, composed in the key of D-flat major.

Taken as a whole, Guarneri seems to have done a good job in embracing the rich breadth of the nineteenth century, providing an engaging diversity in the recordings they released for this period.

Piano Quintets Conclude SFP Chamber Series

Leif Ove Andsnes at his keyboard (photograph by Helge Hansen, courtesy of SFP)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances (SFP) concluded its Shenson Chamber Series with a program structured around two piano quintets. Pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, who has been giving SFP performances since November of 1994, performed with members of the Dover Quartet (first appearing for SFP in October of 2016), violinist Bryan Lee, violist Julianne Lee, and cellist Camden Shaw. First violinist Joel Link was indisposed and was replaced by Adam Barnett-Hart, first violinist of the Escher Quartet. The first of the quintets performed was Ernst von Dohnányi’s Opus 26, his second quintet in E-flat minor. The intermission was then followed by Johannes Brahms’ Opus 34, the more familiar quintet in F minor.

It would be fair to say that the Brahms quintet is a major icon in the chamber music repertoire. By now I have lost count of the number of times I have heard it in performance, but it never fails to get the juices flowing. If I were to speculate, I might even guess that there is something about the score that brings out the best in the musicians, possibly because, over the course of the composition, every one of them has many opportunities to stand out among his/her colleagues. (Yes, that includes the second violin!) Even with the last-minute substitution, the chemistry exuded by the full ensemble could not have been richer; and I found it a joy to let my eyes wander from one player to another, making note of how each of them could express both individuality and group membership. Last night’s performance was, indeed, “one for the books!”

The Dohnányi selection was another matter. According to my records, I have not encountered one of his pieces in recital since March of 2020, when his Opus 10 serenade in C major was performed in a Music in the Mishkan program. I have been a bit more fortunate in finding recordings of his music; but I am almost certain that Opus 26 was a “first contact” for me. His rhetoric tends to be affable, but what really locked in my attention was the fugue around which the final movement was structured. I really need to get to know this music better in the hope that I shall find it again in future piano quintet recitals!

The program began with Joaquín Turina’s string quartet entitled “La oración del torero” (the bullfighter’s prayer). Curiously, the music was first composed for a quartet of lutes for members of the Aguilar Quartet, formed in 1923 by four of Dr. Francisco Aguilar’s six sons: Paco, Ezequiel, Pepe, and Elisa. As might be expected, the string quartet version receives more performances; and, while I had been familiar with the title, this was a “first contact” experience for me. The music is episodic, traversing a rich variety of dispositions reflecting what must be going through a bullfighter’s mind before he enters the ring. Indeed, the breadth of expressiveness in this music was rich enough that I would hope to encounter another performance of this music sooner, rather than later!

SFP: Pianist Andsnes to Join Dover Quartet

Dover Quartet members Camden Shaw, Julianne Lee, Bryan Lee, and Joel Link (photography by Roy Cox, courtesy of SFP)

San Francisco Performances (SFP) will conclude this season’s Shenson Chamber Series with a program structured around two piano quintets. Pianist Leif Ove Andsnes will join the members of the Dover Quartet (violinists Joel Link and Bryan Lee, Julianne Lee on viola, and cellist Camden Shaw) for these performances. The second half of the program will be more familiar, devoted entirely to Johannes Brahms’ Opus 34 quintet in F minor. The selection for the first half will be Ernst von Dohnányi’s Opus 26, his second quintet in the key of E-flat minor. The Dover musicians will begin the program with Joaquín Turina Opus 34, “La oración del torero” (the bullfighter’s prayer). (Fun fact: Turina scored this music for either a string quartet or four lutes!)

This program will begin, as usual, in Herbst Theatre at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 25. As most readers probably know by now, Herbst is on the first two floors of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. Tickets are being sold for $80 for premium seating in the Orchestra, the Side Boxes, and the front and center of the Dress Circle, $70 for the center rear of the Dress Circle and the remainder of the Orchestra, and $60 for the remainder of the Dress Circle and the Balcony. They may be purchased through an SFP secure Web page or by calling 415-392-2545.

Boult Ill Served by LPO “Musical Legacy” Album

courtesy of PIAS

At the end of last year, the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) released a five-CD boxed set of historical recordings conducted by Adrian Boult. In the preceding months the individual albums had been released digitally. The project had been timed to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Boult’s appointment as the LPO’s Principal Conductor.

The story behind that appointment has been nicely summarized on Boult Wikipedia page as follows:

Forced to leave the BBC in 1950 on reaching retirement age, Boult took on the chief conductorship of the LPO. The orchestra had declined from its peak of the 1930s, but under his guidance its fortunes were revived. He retired as its chief conductor in 1957, and later accepted the post of president. Although in the latter part of his career he worked with other orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and his former orchestra, the BBC Symphony, it was the LPO with which he was primarily associated, conducting it in concerts and recordings until 1978, in what was widely called his "Indian Summer".

Boult’s career was extensive and diverse. One of his earliest commitments involved conducting for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and he also conducted opera and ballet performances at the Royal Opera House in London. By the time he came to the LPO, he commanded an extensive and diverse repertoire, meaning that a collection of five CD’s can barely scratch the surface of that repertoire.

Thus the very first CD presents two symphonies that amount of “previews” of more extensive projects. The first of these is Edward Elgar’s Opus 55 (first) symphony in A-flat major, which, as far as I am concerned, is better appreciated in 19-CD box set of the complete EMI recordings of Boult conducting Elgar’s music. Similarly, the second offering is Ralph Vaughan Williams’ sixth symphony in E minor, which has its own complete EMI recordings release of thirteen CDs. (Out of fairness I should point out that, back in the days before CDs, I had the vinyl versions of both of these Boult collections.)

The title of the second CD is Beethoven and Beyond. Beethoven is represented only by his Opus 55 (“Eroica”) symphony in E-flat major. The “beyond” is a rather odd pairing of Max Bruch (the Opus 47 “Kol Nidrei”) and Ernst von Dohnányi’s Opus 25 “Variations on a Nursery Tune.” Any reflections on Beethoven are purely coincidental; but most listeners know that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had already composed a set of keyboard variations (K. 265) on the theme Dohnányi had selected.

The third CD is entitled Music from the Ballet, and it probably offers a relatively satisfying profile of Boult’s approaches to working with both Diaghilev and the Royal Opera House. There is considerable focus on Léo Delibes with excerpts from his most familiar ballet scores for Sylvia and Coppélia. This is also the only CD offering music by Igor Stravinsky, but the music has nothing to do with the composer’s Ballets Russes period. Rather, the “Circus Polka” was composed in 1942 for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Balanchine had been approached to create a ballet that was performed by fifty elephants and fifty ballerinas; and the full title of Stravinsky’s score was “Circus Polka: For a Young Elephant.”

The remaining two CDs are both highly varied assortments. The title of the fourth is The Versatile Conductor, beginning with the familiar trumpet voluntary from Jeremiah Clarke’s suite in D major and concluding with George Gershwin’s “Cuban Overture.” The one composition of extended duration is Béla Bartók’s “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.” The final CD is entitled “Champion of British Music,” surveying selections by Charles Villiers Stanford, Malcolm Arnold, George Butterworth, and Arnold Bax. The collection then concludes, as it began, with Elgar, his Opus 50 concert overture “In the South (Alassio).” Unfortunately, this final track consists only of roughly the second half of the composition. It almost seems as if the original had been on a set of 78s, one of which had been overlooked during the remastering process!

The bottom line is that Boult’s legacy has been much better served by the extensive catalog of recordings he made for EMI. To the best of my knowledge, there has yet to be a “complete edition” of these recordings similar to the one that Warner Classics released for John Barbirolli. However, the Amazon Web pages for the two aforementioned EMI anthologies include hyperlinks to the Warner Classics releases of other Boult collections, any of which are likely to do far greater justice to the Boult legacy than can be found in the LPO’s own production efforts.

Biddulph’s Tertis Survey has Better Choices

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

It is perhaps somewhat ironic that, after a considerable “famine of neglect” of the viola, Biddulph Recordings should release two Critics’ Choices for Viola collections on the same day (October 14) last year. The three-CD collection devoted to William Primrose was discussed on this site two days ago. However, while Primrose came to be fairly well-known thanks to his presence on many RCA albums, the English violist Lionel Tertis tends to be familiar to other violists and not many others. Thus, at the very least, the release of Lionel Tertis: Critics’ Choices for Viola provides one path toward making this violist better known among the current crop of music lovers.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that this release drew my attention specifically because I already knew about Tertis. I first became aware of him in the early Seventies, when my composition teacher, Ezra Sims, had me listen to his recording of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 364 sinfonia concertante in E-flat major. I must confess that, at that time, I had not yet honed the necessary skills for really listening to Mozart; but Sims’ believed almost religiously that this was the only album of K. 364 worthy of attention.

Thus, while I had been more than a little skeptical of the “critics’ choices” made for the Primrose collection, I was eager to listen to the 1933 recording of K. 364 with what I felt was a better-informed “mind behind the ears.” This was the final selection on the three CDs in the Biddulph release, but it made the journey through the entire collection a trip well worth taking. Tertis was joined by violinist Albert Sammons and led by conductor Hamilton Harty on the podium of the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO).

(I was a bit perplexed by the orchestra. Harty was best known for conducting the Hallé Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra, while the LPO was a much newer ensemble set up by Thomas Beecham and the young Malcolm Sargent. However, the recording of K. 364 has enjoyed several releases, all of which seem to credit the LPO as the ensemble.)

To be fair, I should confess that I enjoy the recording that Primrose made for RCA with Jascha Heifetz and the RCA Symphony Orchestra conducted by Izler Solomon. Furthermore, the LPO performance may raise some eyebrows among the congregation of the “historically informed.” As Tully Potter observes in the booklet for the Biddulph release, “Purists need to be warned that Tertis jettisons Mozart’s cadenzas and in the first movement substitutes one based on a concoction by Joseph Hellmesberger the Elder. He also make other emendations.” Given the liberties that Mozart is said to have taken in the cadenzas for his own keyboard concertos, my guess is that, had his ghost been present at this recording session, it probably would have sided with Hellmesberger, rather than those “purists!”

Over the course of the entire Biddulph collection, however, what seems most interesting is how many of the selections involve the viola playing music originally written for either violin or cello. The latter is more understandable, since the viola strings are tuned to the same pitches as those of the cello, only an octave higher. Thus it is no surprise to find violists playing the suites that Johann Sebastian Bach composed for solo cello, since the demands on fingering and bowing are basically the same for both instruments.

Nevertheless, there is nothing “out of place” in the sonorities one experiences when Tertis’ takes on the cello lines for the two significant piano trios in the collection, Franz Schubert’s first (D. 898) in B-flat major and Felix Mendelssohn’s second (Opus 66) in C minor. Sammons is again the violinist, joined this time by pianists Ethel Hobday for the Schubert and William Murdoch (no connection to the fictional Toronto detective) for the Mendelssohn. On the other hand Tertis rises to a higher challenge in taking on Edvard Grieg’s Opus 45 (third) violin sonata in C minor, but his performance is consistently convincing. The same can be said for Ernst von Dohnányi’s Opus 21 violin sonata in C-sharp minor and Frederick Delius’ second violin sonata. Only for that last sonata did Tertis have to prepare his own arrangements, rather than simply reading from the violin part.

As in the Primrose collection, there are a generous number of shorter selections, most of which probably served as encore pieces. However, it is in the multi-movement offerings that the attentive listener can best appreciate Tertis’ musicianship. There are other recordings available, including several released by Biddulph. Nevertheless, this new Critics’ Choice collection probably provides the best approach to getting to know the significance of this twentieth-century violist.

Biddulph’s Uneven Survey of Primrose

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

According to its Wikipedia page, Biddulph Recordings was declared by Musical America to be “the best historical CD label in the world.” The organization was founded in 1989, and that undated quote may have been valid during at least the first half of the final decade of the twentieth century. However, there was a significant sea change during the second half of that decade, which saw the first signs of complete anthologies based on the historically significant archives dating back to the earliest recording sessions provided by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). (As some readers may recall, those sessions involved not only soloists but also orchestras led by conductor Arturo Toscanini.)

That “sea change” led to complete anthologies of violinist Jascha Heifetz, pianist William Kapell, and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. Even though there are overlaps among these three collections, I still value all of them equally enthusiastically. The one major RCA artist of the twentieth century that has not yet been anthologized is the violist William Primrose, who makes significant appearances in all three of those previously released anthologies. So it was that, this past November, I first became aware of Biddulph Recordings and decided to sample its treatment of Primrose through its recently released three-CD set entitled William Primrose: Critics’ Choices for Viola.

My initial reaction was one of wondering just who those critics were and why they made the choices they did. The booklet essay by Tully Potter did not address this issue; and no information was provided by Eric Wen, who produced the album. There were three overlaps with the RCA anthologies:

1. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 424 duo in B-flat major performed with Heifetz
2. Ernst von Dohnányi C major serenade performed with Heifetz and cellist Emanuel Feuermann
3. The viola version of the first of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 120 sonatas (originally composed for clarinet) in F minor with pianist Kapell

In all three of these cases the remastering by Mark Obert-Thorn was neither better or worse than the tracks in those earlier anthologies.

The remainder of the Biddulph collection is, at best, uneven. Several of the earlier offerings involve mistaken attributions and arrangements of variable quality. These occurred frequently when the recording industry was still coming up to speed; but it is hard to imagine the pastiche by Henri Casadesus, which he called a “Handel” concerto, being on any critic’s list of choices. Far more significant are the recordings of two twentieth-century sonatas, one by Arnold Bax in G major and the other by Paul Hindemith in F major, the fourth composition in his Opus 11 collection. Also of interest is that the offering of two short movements by Roy Harris entitled “Soliloquy” and “Dance” was performed by Primrose accompanied by Harris’ wife Johana (whom I had the good fortune to know when I was living in Los Angeles in the Eighties). The other major treasure in this collection is the performance of Brahms’ Opus 91, the so-called “alto songs,” featuring contralto Marian Anderson.

Nevertheless, as much as I wish to learn more about Primrose’s recording legacy, I would prefer to wait patiently until Sony decides to release a complete anthology of his RCA and Columbia recordings.

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?

Discovering Dohnányi with the Takács Quartet

Last night in Herbst Theatre, the annual Shenson Chamber Series, presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP), came to a conclusion with a performance by the Takács Quartet, consisting of violinists Edward Dusinberre and Károly Schranz, violist Geraldine Walther, and cellist  András Fejér. The ensemble made its SFP debut in 2010, and last night was its fifth visit. It will also be Schranz’ last appearance with the group here, because he will be retiring at the end of this month. (This will leave Fejér as the only founding member.)

This ensemble was founded in 1975 by four students at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, but they have not shown a particularly strong bias towards the music of Hungarian composers. Last night, however, the central work on the program was the second string quartet (Opus 15 in D-flat major) by Ernő Dohnányi. Dohnányi lived a long a full life and was productively active during the first half of the twentieth century, but his music has received relatively little attention.

When I was growing up, his Opus 25 “Variations on a Nursery Tune” received a fair amount of attention and was frequently cited as a prime example of music’s capacity for wit. His Opus 10 C major serenade for string trio also received attention for its presence in Jascha Heifetz’ repertoire. I have heard Opus 10 performed several times at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and I cannot remember the last time I heard even a recording of the Opus 25 variations.

1905 photograph of Ernő Dohnányi (photographer unknown, from Wikipedia, public domain)

The Opus 15 quartet was composed in 1906, when Dohnányi was teaching at the Hochschule in Berlin. By way of chronological reference, this was when Anton Webern was beginning his studies with Arnold Schoenberg. 1906 was also the year in which Schoenberg completed his Opus 9 chamber symphony and Schoenberg’s other pupil, Alban Berg, was producing a prodigious number of songs. As a Hungarian point of reference, Béla Bartók would not complete his first string quartet until 1908.

Last night’s performance of Dohnányi’s Opus 15 revealed the work as an energetic flow across three relatively short movements, each of which would flow easily across a diversity of emotional dispositions. It was not difficult to detect a variety of influences on the composer’s abilities to shape themes and express them rhetorically. Every now and then the high level of energy would recall the similar intensity from almost a century earlier in the chamber music of Felix Mendelssohn. Dohnányi in Berlin may not have been as adventurous as his contemporaries in Vienna, but the Takács players demonstrated that he had his own distinctive voice, whose high spirits would eventually be dampened as the twentieth century grew dimmer in successive decades.

If there were any suggestions of Mendelssohn in Dohnányi’s quartet, they reverberated into the second half of the program with the performance of that earlier composer’s final string quartet, Opus 80 in F minor. Mendelssohn was a composer driven by intense energy. Cellist Bonnie Hampton once told her master class students that he was always burning his candle at both ends, and it is easy to imagine that Mendelssohn knew there was little left of that candle when he was working on Opus 80. Fortunately, the Takács players knew how to capture the urgency of the composer’s personal situation without overplaying it. The result was that the attentive listener could appreciate not only the intensity of the darkness but also the solid craft behind establishing that darkness.

Somewhat weaker was the opening selection of the program, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 387 quartet in G major. This is the first of the six quartets that Mozart dedicated to Joseph Haydn, and there is a good chance that they played it together with their fellow quartet members, violinist Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf and cellist Johann Baptist Wanhal. One can almost appreciate the collegial rhetoric that Mozart wrote into this score, and that sense of a string quartet as a gathering of close colleagues is still with us today. (One has only to read Dusinberre’s personal memoir of working with the the ensemble to appreciate that collegiality.)

Sadly, that sense of colleagues enjoying each other’s presence never came across in the Mozart performance. There was almost a sense that the group knew this music “all too well” (the phrase used by Leporello when Don Giovanni’s “house band” starts to play music from The Marriage of Figaro). There was no doubt that all of the notes were in their proper place, but this was music whose social qualities were as significant as the music ones. Without a sense of committed socialization, the performance became little more than a dutiful account of all of those notes.

Takács Quartet to Return to SFP

Takács Quartet members Károly Schranz, Geraldine Walther, András Fejér, and Edward Dusinberre (courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Next month the 2017–2018 Shenson Chamber Series, presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP), will conclude with a return visit from the Takács Quartet. This group was founded in 1975 by four students at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. It took its name from its first violinist, Gábor Takács-Nagy; and the other members were Károly Schranz (second violin), Gábor Ormai (viola), and András Fejér (cello). Edward Dusinberre replaced Takás-Nagy in 1993, and Geraldine Walther become the violist in 2005. (Those of us who have been in the Bay Area for a while know that, prior her joining the group, Walther had been Principal Viola with the San Francisco Symphony.)

The ensemble made its SFP debut in 2010. Since then they have become a favorite of SFP chamber music audiences, and next month will mark their fifth SFP visit. It will also be a landmark occasion, because Schranz has announced that he will retire this coming May 1. Thus, this will be has last appearance in the Bay Area as a member of the group.

While the number of Hungarians in the quartet has been declining monotonically, there is still a significant Hungarian presence in the repertoire. That presence will be taken by Ernő von Dohnányi with a performance of his Opus 15 (second) quartet in D-flat major. The program will begin with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 387 quartet in G major. The concluding selection will be Felix Mendelssohn’s final (sixth) quartet, his Opus 80 in F minor, composed shortly before his death in 1847.

This concert will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 18. As with all Shenson Chamber Series concerts, the venue will be Herbst Theatre. The entrance to Herbst is the the main entrance to the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue, located on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. The venue is excellent for public transportation, since that corner has Muni bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel. Ticket prices are $75 for premium seating in the Orchestra and the front and center of the Dress Circle, $60 for the Side Boxes, the center rear of the Dress Circle, and the remainder of the Orchestra, and $40 for the remainder of the Dress Circle and the Balcony. Tickets may be purchased in advance online through a City Box Office event page.

The Bleeding Edge: 9/4/2017

Having just written about jazzman Mike Greensill unofficially presiding over the launch of the new season in yesterday afternoon’s Old First Concerts (O1C) offering, I am happy to report that, as far as “bleeding edge” activities are concerned, the season is off to a roaring start. Fortunately, my new approach to accounting for these events has already taken care of all but three of this week’s gigs. Here is a review of what has already been announced on this site:

• This weekend’s three concerts in the eighteenth annual San Francisco Electronic Music Festival
• Activities at the Center for New Music for the first half of this month
• Tonight’s Monday Make-Out at the Make Out Room
• The next SIMM Series Concert taking place this coming Sunday

The remaining three events are likely to appeal to a variety of different tastes. Specifics are as follows:

Thursday, September 7, 6:45 p.m., Contemporary Jewish Museum: One of the current exhibitions at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) is The 613. This is a major painting project by Archie Rand which is being given its museum debut and its first appearance outside New York City. The title comes from the number of rules that establish ethical and religious behavior for all Jews. Each rule is given is own acrylic painting on a canvas sixteen inches wide and twenty inches high. These are all arranged in a grid comprising 1700 square feet.

In conjunction with this exhibition, which will continue through October 22, CJM has been arranging concerts presenting works by twentieth-century Jewish minimalist composers to be performed in the setting of Rand’s project. The composer to be featured this week will be Steve Reich. His music will be performed by the William Winant Percussion Group. The selections will include “Music for Pieces of Wood,” the version of “Piano Phase” played by two marimbas, and an excerpt from the four-part “Drumming.”

The CJM is located in SoMa at 736 Mission Street, just north of Yerba Buena Gardens. The performance is expected to last about one hour. General admission will be $10, with a $5 rate for CJM members. Advance tickets will be required for seating. These may be purchased online through an Eventbrite event page.

Saturday, September 9, noon, Noisebridge: This will be the monthly GODWAFFLE NOISE PANCAKES event run by the Noisebridge hackerspace. As usual, gourmet vegan pancakes are served in a context of experimental acts, electronic sounds, and noise. The event runs for two hours, over the course of which there will be performances by R K Faulhber, Mod Life Crisis, Ape Parts, Kevin Lo, and Wooly Mari's Guillotine.

Noisebridge is located at 2169 Mission Street, two blocks south of the BART station at 16th Street. There is no charge for this event, but Noisebridge operates entirely through monetary donations. Operating expenses are over $5000 per month. The Noisebridge home page has information about both membership and ways to donate.

Sunday, September 10, 4 p.m., Old First Presbyterian Church: This is the latest O1C event to venture into “bleeding edge territory.” The performers will be Ensemble Ari, a group of Korean-American musicians with a repertoire conceived with the purpose of bridging Western and Korean culture:

Ensemble Ari, courtesy of Old First Concerts

The Director of the group is composer Jean Ahn, and the program will include one of her pieces that embodies this purpose. “Archimedes’ Principle” was created to explore the blending of the sound of the haegeum, an ancient Korean fiddle, with a traditional Western piano quartet consisting of piano (Sharon Lee Kim), violin (Jiwon Evelyn Kwark), viola (Caroline Lee), and cello (Sarah Hong). The haegeum will be performed by guest artist Sooyeon Lyuh. The remainder of the program will be devoted to twentieth-century Eastern European composers: Béla Bartók, Ernő Dohnányi, Josef Suk, and Bohuslav Martinů.

The Old First Presbyterian Church is located at 1751 Sacramento Street on the southeast corner of Van Ness Avenue. If purchased in advance online from an O1C event page, general admission will be $23 with a discounted rate of $18 for seniors aged 65 or older. Tickets for full-time students showing valid identification will be $5; and children aged twelve and under will still be admitted for free. There is also a discount available for those parking at the Old First Parking Garage at 1725 Sacramento Street, just up the street from the church.

The SFP 2017–2018 Shenson Chamber Series

For this coming season, the San Francisco Performances (SFP) Shenson Chamber Series will focus entirely on string quartets. However, one of those ensembles will appear with a “guest artist.” Taken as a whole, the season promises to be a simulating combination of familiar selections from the traditional repertoire and several distinctive departures from “the usual suspects.” Three of the quartet groups will be returning to SFP, and one will be making a debut.

All four concerts in the series will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Herbst Theatre. The entrance to Herbst is the the main entrance to the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue, located on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. The venue is excellent for public transportation, since that corner has Muni bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel. The specific dates and their related performers are as follows:

Friday, October 13: The guest artist of the season will be cellist Joshua Roman, who will be performing with the JACK Quartet, consisting of violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell. The five of them will play a quintet written specifically for them by Jefferson Friedman. They will also join forces to perform Roman’s composition “Tornado,” which will be receiving its world premiere this coming Monday at the Music Academy of the West. The program will also include John Zorn’s “Ouroboros,” Amy Williams’ “Richer Textures,” and Ari Streisfeld’s arrangements of three five-part madrigals by Carol Gesualdo.

Monday, February 19: This will be the SFP debut performance by the Danish String Quartet. Members are violinists Asbjørn Nørgaard and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, violist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin and cellist Frederik Øland. They will frame their program with Béla Bartók’s first quartet (Opus 7 in A minor) and the first of Ludwig van Beethoven’s three Opus 59 (“Razumovsky”) quartets, written in the key of F major. However, to establish their identity, the group will depart from the usual repertoire by playing selections of folk music from the Nordic countries between these two more familiar offerings.

Friday, March 9: Here in San Francisco the Ébène Quartet, consisting of violinists Pierre Colombet and Gabriel Le Magadure, violist Adrien Boisseau, and cellist Raphaël Merlin, holds the unique distinction of having performed in the SFP Jazz Series, as well as the Chamber series. Regrettably, there will not be a Jazz Series in the 2017–2018 season; so Ébène will situate itself firmly in the traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That will include Beethoven, concluding the program with the second of his Opus 59 quartets. At the other end of the concert, the program will begin with Beethoven’s best known teacher, Joseph Haydn. The selection will be Hoboken III/76, the second of the six quartets published as Opus 76 and written for József Erdődy. This quartet has two nicknames, the more familiar being “Fifths” but also known as “The Donkey.” These two major works from the First Viennese School will be separated by Gabriel Fauré’s Opus 121 quartet in E minor, completed within months of his death of November 4, 1924 and very much a reflection of the nineteenth-century traditions of his past.

Wednesday, April 18: The Series will conclude with the return of the Takás Quartet. Founding members Károly Schranz (second violin) and András Fejér (cello) still play with the group. The more recent members are Edward Dusinberre (first violin) and Geraldine Walther (viola). All founding members were students at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. The group’s Hungarian roots will be honored with the middle selection on the program, Ernő Dohnányi’s Opus 15 (second) quartet in D-flat major. The opening work will be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 387 quartet in G major, and the program will conclude with Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 80 quartet in F minor.

Subscriptions are now on sale for $250 for premium seating in the Orchestra and the front and center of the Dress Circle, $205 for the Side Boxes, the center rear of the Dress Circle, and the remainder of the Orchestra, and $140 for the remainder of the Dress Circle and the Balcony. Subscriptions may be purchased online in advance through a City Box Office event page. Orders may also be placed by calling the SFP subscriber hotline at 415-677-0325, which is open for receiving calls between 9:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. Single tickets will go on sale on July 31.

Lunch with Bartók

Today's Noontime Concerts™ in San Francisco concert consisted entirely of the music of Béla Bartók played by members of the Laurel Ensemble. Pianist Lori Lack accompanied flautist Sarah Holzman in a performance of the Suite Paysanne Hongroise, an arrangement of piano settings of Hungarian folk songs. This was followed by Contrasts, in which Lack, playing music that Bartók had composed for himself, was joined by clarinetist Ann Lavin, playing the part of Benny Goodman, and violinist Christina Mok, playing the part of Joseph Szigeti. (I drop these names because the work was conceived with them in mind.) When this was performed last May by San Francisco Conservatory students, I wrote the following about the music:

Contrasts are everywhere to be found, from the large scale differences across the three movements to the variety of acoustic effects elicited by each instrument and the ways in which these acoustic differences are combined. By way of introduction, we were told that Bartók never particularly liked Goodman; and it is easy enough to see that Bartók might not have taken very well to Goodman's approach to swing (if not to swing in general). In my personal fantasies Bartók suffered the tragedy of being to early for the jazz that would have meant something to him. With his keen ear for recording Hungarian folk music, he probably would have felt more at home with the improvisations of Charlie Parker; and, had he lived long enough, he would have appreciated the effort John Coltrane made to play along with a recording of the introduction to the first movement of his Concerto for Orchestra (from which Coltrane learned the value of wide intervals, which he would then exercise in "Giant Steps"). Whatever the hardships surrounding its composition, however, Contrasts is still a great sonic adventure, giving the ear a roller coaster ride through its contrasts on so many different scales of magnitude; and the Conservatory students did an excellent job of meeting the challenges of this piece, which really deserves to be performed more often.

Any tension that may have existed between Goodman and Bartók was absent in the relationship between Lavin and Lack. Indeed, Lavin summoned up a variety of brash sounds that were about as remote as one could get from Goodman's brand of swing (but right at home with both Bird and Trane), entirely consistent with Bartók's particular brand of rhetoric, which could be vulgar without necessarily being offensive. Thus, the roller coaster was still there; and Mok was equally at home on it, particularly when she launched into the sort of cadenza in the final movement that Trane himself, with his habit of trying to learn new licks from recordings, would have been tempted to acquire. The opening suite was a bit more on the tame side, although every now and then Holzman caught on to the folk spirit with her own bursts of energy. Since the last time I heard Bartók's music, it was a link in a chain that ran from Ernő von Dohnányi to György Kurtág, I appreciated the opportunity to hear him dominate an entire program!

Beach Chamber Music: A First Taste

My first impression of Amy Beach's Opus 67, her F sharp minor piano quintet, was that my study of her Opus 15 Sketches did very little to prepare me for the experience. I should not have anticipated otherwise. The four Sketches, composed in 1892, fit nicely into a repertoire of short poetic works for solo piano whose origins can probably best be placed in the shorter piano works of Franz Schubert. Within that repertoire she is chronologically a contemporary of Ferruccio Busoni (about a year younger) and most likely shared with him the influences of Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, and Anton Rubinstein. 1892 happens to be the publication year of Busoni's Opus 31a Konzertstück for piano and orchestra, the work with which he won the 1890 Anton Rubinstein competition in Moscow. However, while Antony Beaumont identifies Busoni's inspirational sources for this work as Brahms, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Max Reger, Beach's Sketches are more a product of exposure to nineteenth-century American salons, where many of the compositions in John Gillespie's Nineteenth-Century American Piano Music anthology were performed.

Another interesting point of chronological orientation comes from Charles Ives, who was about seven years younger than Beach and composed his set of organ variations on "America" in 1891. Ives could never seem to resist the opportunity to express his contempt for that nineteenth-century piano repertoire, whether in text or in his own approach to composition. It is therefore at least slightly ironic that, in last night's performance of Beach's piano quintet, pianist William Wellborn was joined by the Ives Quartet, so named, according to the program, out of inspiration "by the passionate, artistic commitment and unique temperament" of that composer.

The chronology of the Beach piano quintet puts it in 1907, a time when Ives was just beginning to find his own rebellious way. Beach had come a long way from the short works of 1892 and the influence of light salon entertainment. This is serious chamber music on the scale of the other piano quintets and quartets that constitute its legacy (the same legacy that Ives would later take on in beginning work on his only piano trio in 1909). However, while I felt I had a comfortable sense of context for the Sketches, I was less sure of how to establish context for this particular piano quintet (as opposed to my first encounter with Ernő von Dohnányi's Opus 1 piano quintet, which clearly used Brahms as its point of departure). Perhaps the most important thing about Beach's approach is that she seemed after a way to compose a work for five "equals," as opposed to the frequent domination of the piano resulting in a "concerto for piano and very small orchestra." One might even say that she was anticipating later twentieth-century composition with a sensitivity for the sonority of each instrument that tends to occupy the ear more than her strategies for counterpoint and harmony. (Perhaps at least some of that interest in sonority grew out of her interest in documenting bird songs.)

Most important is that there is more in this composition than could be grasped by the single occasion of last night's performance at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. This is a work that deserves more attention. As I mentioned on Saturday, it occupies a somewhat culminating position in the history of piano quintets and quartets; and it is also a significant contribution to the repertoire of American music at the beginning of a new century. It deserves further listening, and we would do well to strive for a better understanding of the context in which it was situated. Saturday's conjecture that Wellborn had structured the first half of his program as a gradus ad Parnassum to Beach by way of Domenico Scarlatti, Joseph Haydn, and Franz Liszt turned out not to be the case. Liszt may have been an influence for the Sketches, but the piano quintet was cut from quite another cloth. Recent concerts have done much to expand our "listening comprehension" of compositions (particularly American) from the middle of the twentieth century; we all need to learn more about what was happening at the beginning of that century.

To Infinite Brahms and Beyond

By paying so much (too much?) attention to whether or not Johannes Brahms was "stuck in the long shadow of the history of the music that preceded him, particularly that of Ludwig van Beethoven," I realize I have neglected the extent to which Brahms cast a shadow of his own into the twentieth century, perhaps because it sometimes seems as if Arnold Schoenberg was the only one to recognize that shadow. Indeed, on the basis of the Chamber Music Masters concert at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music last night, organized around the visit of violist Kim Kashkashian, there is good reason to believe that Brahms was already casting that shadow before his death. Viewed in terms of that possible shadow, what made last night's event particularly interesting was that the four composers on the program were all Hungarian, thus at least suggesting that, for all the ways in which Brahms had been influenced by Hungarian sources, the "real Hungarians" were now ready to turn the tables on him, not so much out of revenge but more out of a need to clarify Hungarian identity.

The laws of optics explain why it is that shadows are always sharper when one is closer to both the source and the light behind it. From this point of view, I think it makes sense to examine the works on the program in chronological order. This is not the order in which they were performed; but, since the order listed in the program also had to be modified, I have no qualms about imposing my own order to provide a better perspective on the listening experience.

Thus, I shall begin with the final work on the program, the Opus 1 of Ernő (Ernst) von Dohnányi, the first (of two) piano quintets he composed, this one in C minor. According to my records, I have written about Dohnányi only twice and about the same composition on both occasions, his Opus 10 Serenade for string trio. In both of those programs, his music was coupled with that of Brahms; and my first post was entitled, "Late Brahms and Early Dohnányi." However, while this Serenade dates from 1902, the piano quintet was completed in1895, which puts it approximately two years before Brahms' death and one year after the two Opus 120 clarinet sonatas with which Brahms had emerged from "retirement" under the inspiration of Richard Mühlfeld.

Whether or not Dohnányi intended it, there is nothing wrong with listening to this piano quintet as a sincere homage to Brahms Both the key and the plan of the work follow those of Brahms' final (Opus 60) piano quartet (about twenty years old when Dohnányi was working on his own project); and, as is the case in the Brahms piano quartet, the third movement is dominated by a melodic line in the lower voices. However, while the cello dominates in the Brahms, the viola takes the lead in the Dohnányi, which may explain Kashkashian's interest in the work. The only really interesting difference is that Dohnányi has dispensed with the "Werther connection," often associated with the Brahms piano quartet. In spite of its minor key, the Dohnányi quintet is charged with highly positive energy and has progressed into the major key by its final movement. Thus, this is a work that, even if it is an "Opus 1," has very much established its own voice; and the "family resemblance" to Brahms simply guides our understanding, just as Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that conceptual understanding, in general, is guided by such family resemblance.

The next work in the chronological ordering I have chosen to follow is a 1905 Adagio for viola and piano (again featuring Kashkashian) by Zoltán Kodály. In this case the only time I previously wrote about Kodály's music was when it also shared a program with Brahms, this time the Opus 25 G minor piano quartet, with its distinctively Hungarian final movement. It sometimes feels as if Kodály is better known for his ethnomusicological studies of Hungarian folk music than for his composing; but, if I am to believe the dates in his Wikipedia entry, I would assume that this Adagio was completed before he began his extensive field work. This is thus another composition where the primary influence appears to be coming from Brahms, most likely the reworking of the Opus 120 clarinet sonatas as viola sonatas. As was the case with the Brahms sonatas, it is an excellent vehicle for demonstrating just how lyrical the sound of a viola can be; but it makes its case in a single ternary-form movement.

Chronological order next brings us to Béla Bartók and the 44 violin duos, number 98 in András Szöllősy's chronological Sz. numbers. These were completed in 1931, which places them after Bartók had begun to accompany Kodály in his ethnomusicological field work. We have now left the domain of direct influence from Brahms and entered that of some of Brahms' sources. Bartók, however, was finding his voice in the original sounds, which were often quite striking in comparison with what one was expecting to hear in a concert setting. Eleven of these duos were performed from a transcription for two violas, possibly by Kashkashian herself. They were also arranged (again possibly by Kashkashian) for an ensemble of eight violas, which included six students and Conservatory Faculty Member Jodi Levitz (along with Kashkashian herself). These arrangements used the ensemble in a variety of ways, not only in terms of when a voice was played by a single or multiple instruments but also with regard to the spatial effects of which voices came from which directions. (The ensemble was arranged in a U formation, with the open end facing the audience.) All of the works were brief, and a few felt as if they filled the duration of a single breath. However, even the more pensive works were highly charged with energy; and I could easily understand why, chronological considerations aside, this made for an excellent beginning of the evening's program.

This brings us to 1978, the year in which György Kurtág completed his "Hommage À Mihàly András, 12 Mikroludien Für Streichquartett." I was first introduced to Kurtág when Marino Formenti gave his three "San Francisco Piano Trips" recitals in April of 2007, the first of which was entitled "Kurtág's Ghosts." From that concert I learned that Kurtág was a miniaturist with a truly exhaustive sense of music history. I also formed the suspicion that he had a sense of humor; and that suspicion was confirmed when I heard another of his homage compositions, this one for Robert Schumann, performed last April in another Chamber Music Masters concert. That humor is again evident in his bilingual title in which he invents a word that conjures up Bartók's (also miniaturist) Mikrokosmos, the plural of the German for "prelude" that we find in the scores for Johann Sebastian Bach, and quite possibly a play on the Latin ludus for "game" (as in Paul Hindemith's own set of preludes and fugues, Ludus Tonalis). The shadow of Brahms has now grown so faint that we can barely recognize it (if it is still there at all in any form other than Kurtág's "Schumann connection"); and it may even have been displaced by the shadow of Anton Webern. These pieces are even shorter than the Bartók duos, and they reflect the influence of both Bartók and Webern in their approach to eliciting unconventional sounds for the instruments of a string quartet. They also remind us just how far our capacity for listening has progressed since the death of Brahms and how much further it may yet venture!

Getting the Scale Right

Last night's String and Piano Chamber Music recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music confirmed my thoughts from Monday about "recital scale." The major work on the program was the C Minor piano quartet, Opus 60, of Johannes Brahms. I had heard Joel Krosnick coach the Andante movement of this quartet when he visited for his Master Class; and I really wanted to hear it in its entirety, since I had not heard a "live" performance since 1983, during a series of concerts at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan that covered all of Brahms' chamber music for piano and strings. Brahms was very clear about this being a highly emotional work; and Krosnick invoked the adjective "heartbreaking" for the cello solo that begins the Andante.

However, all of that emotion is not a matter of unbridled wailing. There were certainly fortissimo moments last night, but they were all the stronger in a context where loudness was strictly modulated to achieve the highest intensity. Furthermore, Brahms put so much into the piano part that it comes close to being a piano concerto for "very small orchestra," which makes the proper balancing of the four quartet voices particularly critical. The result was a striking opposition to the approach I had experienced in Heidi Melton's vocal recital. In this one piece of chamber music Brahms may have made his most "operatic" gestures; but he made them at "chamber" scale. The Conservatory students performing this piece seem to have put in the necessary effort to comprehend how those gestures should be delivered at the requisite scale; and the result was far more exciting than anything I heard on Sunday, including Richard Strauss' "Frülingsfeier," which posed the same problem of operatic gesture at chamber scale.

The program opening on an even smaller scale with Maurice Ravel's sonata for violin and cello. Ravel is usually best appreciated for his sonorities (and justifiably so); and this work experiments with such sonorities in its two instruments. both as individual voices and as blends of coloration. On the other hand Ravel is only seldom known for his wit, even though his G major piano concerto opens with a slapstick. The experiments in this sonata are clearly playful ones, which was a clever rhetorical move on Ravel's part. For his contemporaries many of the sounds were likely to have been perceived as bizarre, so he had the foresight to provide a spoonful of sugar to make the weirdness go down. He also kept his movements relatively brief, but each was still a minor gem in its construction.

The remaining work on the program provided me with a second opportunity (twice in one month) to hear Ernő von Dohnányi's Opus 10 Serenade for string trio. As I had previously observed, this is also a work of relatively brief gems. It is nowhere near as experimental as the Ravel sonata, but it displays the same appreciation of wit. Thus, the first half of last night's program began on the light side, so after the intermission we were settled in enough to deal with the emotional wallop of Brahms' venture into the darkness!

Late Brahms and Early Dohnányi

Doing my best to get back from today's Noontime Concert at Old St. Mary's Cathedral (which happens to be in San Francisco Chinatown) before a threatening rain storm reminded me that the last time I had heard a live performance of Johannes Brahms' Opus 115 clarinet quintet had been in the McCarter Theater at Princeton University. There was a raging storm outside and a hole in the McCarter roof directly above where the cello was supposed to sit. (If memory serves me correctly, the ensemble was the Tokyo String Quartet performing with Richard Stoltzman.) This is little more than one of those odd free associations. It is certainly not meant to associate Brahms with any of those corny illustrations of Beethoven stomping his way through a wind-driven rain; and there is nothing "element-driven" about this particular quintet!

If anything, because of the high opus number, there is a tendency to assign it a valedictory quality. It is certainly a very poignant composition; so one can be forgiven for hearing it as a "farewell to life." However, poignancy was Brahms' strong suit for much of his life; and, given the works he composed after this one, there is no reason to assume that this was intended as a meditation on death. Rather, as we can read in the Wikipedia entry for Brahms, the work grew out of a new sense of discovery brought about by the clarinet itself:

In 1890, the 57 year-old Brahms resolved to give up composing. However, as it turned out, he was unable to abide by his decision, and in the years before his death he produced a number of acknowledged masterpieces. His admiration for Richard Mühlfeld, clarinetist with the Meiningen orchestra, moved him to compose the Clarinet Trio Op. 114, Clarinet Quintet Op. 115 (1891), and the two Clarinet Sonatas Op. 120 (1894).

This makes for an interesting parallel with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who wrote his K. 581 clarinet quintet for Anton Stadler in 1789, within two years of his death. Like Mozart, Brahms appreciated that the three registers of the clarinet constituted three distinctive "voices" and felt that each of these voices should "sing" in the course of the entire composition. While there is plenty of other chamber music for clarinet, these two quintets still occupy pride of place in the repertoire and show off the best abilities of their respective composers.

The Laurel Ensemble, which performed the Brahms quintet today, may not be as elevated as Stoltzman and his colleagues were; but that did not diminish from their performance. Clarinetist Ann Lavin commanded all three of her instrument's registers with equal capability, always finding just the right blend with the string quartet members. The result was not necessarily as poignant as other performances but had more to do with an almost meditative calm over the discovery of a new palette of sounds. Given all the things I have written about workplace pathology, this was the sort of performance that was the perfect escape from the strains of a workday.

Music that "brought Brahms out of retirement" was preceded by a work by the 25-year-old Ernő von Dohnányi, his Opus 10 Serenade for string trio. I cannot recall having an opportunity to hear this work in performance, so I know it only through the recording the Jascha Heifetz made in 1941 with William Primrose and Emanuel Feuermann. Dohnányi may not have had quite the elaborate sense of development that Brahms had. The work is in five short movements, the longest being the fourth in theme-and-variations form. Even there the variations are more straightforward than the exploratory variations in the final movement of the Brahms clarinet quintet (which ultimately lead back to the first theme of the entire work). Nevertheless, having been written in 1902, the Dohnányi trio is one of those works that looks back fondly on the gestures of nineteenth-century romanticism while searching for how to take composition in new directions. This piece certainly deserves to be heard more often, and it was good for the Laurel Ensemble to provide us with an opportunity.