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!

SOMM to Release Tribute to Fischer-Dieskau

While I had recognized the name of baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau through my regular perusals of the Schwann catalog of recordings, my “first contact” with listening to his voice came about when I added Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem to my collection. The libretto incorporated poems written by Wilfred Owen during World War I; and Fischer-Dieskau took the “role” of a German soldier, complemented by tenor Peter Pears representing an English soldier. Fischer-Dieskau had more than a few problems with English pronunciation; but none of them interfered with the expressiveness of his delivery, whether it involved the intensity of battle or the poignant setting in the final movement of “Let us sleep now,” sung in duo with Pears.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau on the cover of the “tribute” album about to be released (from the Amazon.com Web page for this recording)

However, my account of Fischer-Dieskau’s recordings has been relatively modest, particular in light of the eleven-CD box set of the recordings he made for EMI. This Friday, SOMM Recordings will release a two-CD album entitled Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: A Centenary Tribute; and, as is usually the case, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders. The second CD is devoted entirely to two interviews, the first for his 75th birthday in 2000 and the second for his 80th birthday in 2005. The first CD offers an engaging interleaving of familiar vocal works among the less familiar.

All of the familiar offerings are by Gustav Mahler, with three songs from Lieder und Gesänge aus der Jugendzeit coupled with three of the Rückert-Lieder songs. These are all recital recordings with pianist Karl Engel accompanying Fischer-Dieskau. There are also five tracks of settings by Ferruccio Busoni of poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as well as also single settings of Goethe by Richard Strauss and Max Reger. The less familiar composers in the repertoire are Anna Amalia, Johann Friedrich Reichart, and Carl Friedrich Zelter. The album then concludes with three songs in Hungarian, two by Zoltán Kodály and one a folk song.

I have to confess that one of the reasons that drew me to this album is my interest in the Busoni catalog. I am almost certain that this was my first encounter with his approach to art song, and Fischer-Dieskau could not have been a better advocate. It is also worth noting that the Kodály tracks provided accompaniment by the London Symphony Orchestra with Kodály himself on the podium. Thus, as “centenary tributes” go, the “historical content” of this album is decidedly impressive. My guess is that Busoni and Kodály will be the primary factors in drawing me back to this album for further listening!

Warner’s CD of David Oistrakh’s Encores

Cover of the Seraphim album of Oistrakh encore recordings when it was released on vinyl by Seraphim (from the Amazon.com Web page)

This morning I listened to the single CD of encore performances in the Warner Remastered Edition box set collection of recordings of performances by Russian violinist David Oistrakh. This consisted of eight compositions, five of which were composed for violin and piano. Among the three arrangements, the only one familiar to me was the “Jota” movement from Manuel de Falla’s set of seven Spanish folksongs (Siete canciones populares españolas), arranged by Paul Kochanski. The other two arrangers are Alexandre Roelens and Vasily Bezekirsky. The “original” compositions are as follows:

• Eugène Ysaÿe: “Extase” (Opus 21)
• Josef Suk: “Píseň lásky” (“song of love,” the first in the Opus 7 collection of six piano pieces)
• Zoltán Kodály: arrangements of three Hungarian folk songs
• Henryk Wieniawski: “Légende” (Opus 17)
• Aleksander Zarzycki: “Mazurka” (Opus 26)

This makes for a rather modest offering when compared with the generous number of encore selections that were recorded by Jascha Heifetz. Nevertheless, the CD definitely serves up an engaging journey of discovery. Sadly, I do not have many opportunities to encounter violin recitals. However, now that I have been introduced to the works on this album, I would certainly enjoy encountering them in performance.

This completes my account of the Warner CDs of recordings that Oistrakh made for Columbia in New York and HMV in London. However, the box set also includes 31 additional CDs under the rubric Premières, Rarities & Live Performances, along with three DVDs. Quite honestly, I am not yet sure how I shall work my way through the rest of this collection. Watch this space for further developments and (hopefully) insights into Oistrakh’s reputation!

Masur’s Twentieth-Century Repertoire

The final account of the recordings made by conductor Kurt Masur collected in a 70-CD box set released by Warner Classics will address his twentieth-century repertoire. There is far less completeness in this portion of the collection than had been encountered in his nineteenth-century recordings. The only commitment to thoroughness can be found in the five piano concertos by Sergei Prokofiev, recordings made with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra featuring piano soloist Michel Béroff.

This provides a somewhat limited perspective on the composer, particularly since the only symphony included in the collection is the Opus 100 (fifth) symphony in B-flat major. This selection was recorded with the New York Philharmonic on an album that also included a not-particularly-satisfying collection of excerpts from the music for the Romeo and Juliet ballet. Somewhat better was the CD with the concert version of the music composed for Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky film and the Opus 20 Scythian suite, originally conceived as a score for “Ala i Lolli,” a ballet commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev who rejected the music.

Mind you, there is a considerable diversity in nationalities among the other twentieth-century selections. Thus, Prokofiev’s symphony is complemented by two symphonies by Dmitri Shostakovich: the Opus 60 “Leningrad” in C major and the Opus 113 “Babi Yar” (setting poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko) in B-flat minor, which is framed by recordings of Yevtushenko reading two of his poems (in Russian). There is also a recording of Gustav Mahler’s ninth symphony in D major, which provides a potentially viable context for the symphonic efforts of both Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

The only other concerto offering is the Opus 47 violin concerto in D minor by Jean Sibelius on an album which is filled out by three shorter compositions. This is a Leipzig CD featuring Thomas Zehetmair as the violin soloist. Nationalism can also be found in the contributions by Leoš Janáček and Zoltán Kodály. Curiously, Béla Bartók is absent from this collection.

Another coupling involves familiar works by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel on a single volume. The one departure from “the usual” is Debussy’s L. 104 “Rapsodie,” scored for alto saxophone and piano and orchestrated by Jean Roger-Ducasse. A more interesting coupling is that of Kurt Weill with Alban Berg. The Weill selection is the score for the ballet “The Seven Deadly Sins” with a libretto by Bertolt Brecht. This is followed by the symphonic movements that Alban Berg extracted from his score for the opera Lulu (which is not quite as systematic in exploring the deadly sins).

The only other vocal offering is the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss. This is a New York Philharmonic recording featuring soprano Deborah Voigt. That performance is preceded by two familiar tone poems, “Don Juan” and “Death and Transfiguration.”

There is also a Philharmonic recording of Benjamin Britten’s Opus 66 War Requiem, featuring vocal soloists Carol Vaness (soprano), Jerry Hadley (tenor), and Thomas Hampson (baritone). Mind you, there will always be those that prefer the recording that Britten himself conducted with tenor Peter Pears and baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. While I am definitely hooked on both of those vocalists, I cannot say the same for the soprano that Britten conducted, Galina Vishnevskaya. Apparently, no one took the trouble to coach her on the proper pronunciation of the Latin Requiem texts; and her account of “Liber scriptus” verges on the downright painful. Vaness is much more at home with singing Latin.

Then there is an album that is not, strictly speaking, a Mazur album. It presents pianist Fazil Say playing the music of George Gershwin, providing his own arrangements where necessary. Masur and the Philharmonic appear only for Ferde Grofé’s arrangement of “Rhapsody in Blue” and the set of variations on “I Got Rhythm.”

That leaves only two offerings that can be classified as “bleeding edge” compositions. The older of them is the set of variations on “America” that Charles Ives composed for organ, which was then orchestrated by William Schumann. The more recent is the cello concerto by Alfred Schnittke, featuring cellist Natalia Gutman performing with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. This left me wishing that Masur had conducted more Schnittke selections and that there had been a recording of his performance of the music by Sofia Gubaidulina that he led with the San Francisco Symphony.

New Conductor and Familiar Soloist at Davies

Cellist Joshua Roman (from the SFS event page for last night’s concert)

Last night Davies Symphony Hall saw the debut of Colombian conductor Lina González-Grandos on the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). Once again this was a program with a concerto at its core. Robert Schumann’s Opus 129 cello concerto in A minor had been planned to feature Pablo Ferrández as soloist. However, due to visa and travel complications, Ferrández could not appear in Davies; and he was replaced by Joshua Roman, a cellist familiar to many San Francisco music lovers.

Roman made his SFS debut in February of 2010 with Herbert Blomstedt conducting Joseph Haydn's 1765 cello concerto in C major, Hoboken VIIb/1. This was followed by his Bay Area recital debut in January of 2012 as the first artist to perform in San Francisco Performances’ newly launched Young Masters Series. Over the course of that decade, Roman’s activities have taken him beyond the confines of the concert hall, as comfortable giving a TED Talk as visiting HIV/AIDS centers and displacement centers in Uganda. Last night he returned to a more traditional setting.

Schumann composed his Opus 129 at a time when he was prodigiously creative (as might be guessed from the opus number). As is the case in his earlier (Opus 54) piano concerto in A minor, there is a smooth flow across the overall three-movement structure. However, the virtuoso turns for the cello account for only a portion of the delights in the overall listening experience. Schumann also engaged in a generous number of ventures into innovative instrumentation, and González-Granados made sure that listeners were aware of just how innovative those sonorities were. As a result both performers had their own ways of casting this concerto in the best possible light.

Roman was clearly familiar to many in the audience, and he was received with enthusiastic applause at the conclusion of the concerto. Clearly his fans wanted an encore, but they probably could not have anticipated what they got. Roman first remarked on the need to deal with crazy times, possibly by engaging in a bit of one’s own craziness. He then began to sing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” providing his own arrangement of accompaniment on his cello. Many concert-goers probably know by now that “Hallelujah” has been sneaking its way in the encore repertoire of many vocalists. However, Roman’s approach was decidedly unique; and it was so convincing that he had most of the audience singing along during the final chorus. To mix metaphors, that encore performance established that, while we may not be out of the woods, we are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The Schumann concerto was framed on either side by music from the first half of the twentieth century. The program concluded with Zoltán Kodály’s “Dances of Galánta,” a two-part slow-fast rhapsody that draws upon folk music that Kodály collected during his pioneering ethnomusicological research in Eastern Europe. Principal Clarinet Cary Bell had a generous share of clarinet work thanks to Kodály’s efforts to evoke the sonorities of the Romanian single-reed instrument for folk music.

The program began with the first of the two suites that Manuel de Falla extracted from his score for the two-act ballet The Three-Cornered Hat, choreographed by Leonid Massine for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The original score consisted of eight movements, four for each of the two acts. Falla’s suites each had four movements, but they did not follow either the grouping or the ordering of the original score. Thus, while there have been many performances of excerpts from this ballet score, the movements of the first suite were probably unfamiliar to most of the listeners in Davies.

Nevertheless, González-Granados brought an engaging sense of flow to the entire suite, which lasted only about ten minutes. Her balancing of the rich sonorities in Falla’s score made for a stimulating account of the full SFS resources. At the same time there were any number of more subtle sonorities, such as the writing for harp, that made the overall rhetoric indisputably compelling. There is an old joke that George Szell used to “play” the Cleveland Orchestra is if it was his “instrument” rather than an ensemble. González-Granados may not have been as manipulative as Szell, but she certainly knew how to give all the details the due credit that they deserved.

Kodály Comes to SFSymphony+ Chamber Music

Victor Romasevich and Jill Rachuy Brindel playing Kodály’s Opus 7 duo (screen short courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

The latest installment in the Chamber Music Series of videos streamed by SFSymphony+ was added this past Thursday. Readers may recall that the last such video discussed on this site was a duo performance by San Francisco Symphony (SFS) musicians Amos Yang on cello and Charles Chandler on bass. The new video also presents a duo performance with a cellist, this time Jill Rachuy Brindel. On this video, however, the cello is coupled with the higher-register violin, played by Victor Romasevich.

The duo being performed was Zoltán Kodály’s Opus 7, structured in three movements. Those of my generation that know this music at all probably know it because of the recording made by two of RCA Victor’s top-notch talents in the decades following the end of World War II, violinist Jascha Heifetz and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, both living comfortably in Southern California and making recordings at the RCA Studios in Hollywood. Recognizing that most of the record-buying classical music lovers probably knew nothing about Kodály, RCA decided to package it on a long-playing record shared with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 8 serenade for string trio in D major. Mind you, Opus 8 was not particularly familiar either; but record buyers would usually go for Beethoven, even when they were unfamiliar with the music itself.

Kodály’s duo was composed in 1914, about a decade after his pioneering ethnomusicological research with Béla Bartók. It is not difficult to detect folk influences among the themes that populate the three movements of the duo. However, there is also a solid command of the scope of string technique, resulting in a generous share of virtuoso passages, often passed from one instrument to the other. In that context the camera work for this video is top-notch when it comes to directing the viewer to these themes as they unfold and develop. That sensitivity to content can be easily mined from the performance because the performers themselves give a clear account of both the exposition and the development of the thematic material.

This music will probably be familiar to a relatively small number of listeners, but those having a “first encounter” experience are likely to be readily drawn into the entire thematic landscape that Kodály develops over the course of his score.

Two Generations of Hungarian Cello Music

courtesy of Naxos of America

This Friday Naxos will release an album featuring the German cellist Gabriel Schwabe playing twentieth-century Hungarian music. The CD is framed by the chamber music of Zoltán Kodály, beginning with the Opus 7 duo for violin (Hellen Weiß) and cello and concluding with the Opus 8 solo sonata. Between these two selections is György Ligeti’s solo cello sonata, which was originally composed in 1948 during his studies at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, where one of his teachers was Kodály. As expected, Amazon.com has created a Web page to process pre-orders of this recording.

I was particularly struck by the fact that this may be the first time these three compositions (or, for that matter, any pair of them) have been juxtaposed on a single album. RCA made a landmark recording of Opus 7 pairing cellist Gregor Piatigorsky with violinist Jascha Heifetz; but I have been hard-pressed to find a recording of Piatigorsky playing Opus 8. More recently, Matt Haimovitz has taken on both Opus 8 and the Ligeti sonata; but I am not sure if he has recorded Opus 7. Personally, I am particularly interested in the Ligeti offering, since it was composed “before Ligeti became Ligeti,” so to speak. Even after it was revised in 1953, it served as a reflection on Hungarian rhetoric. Any explorations of pitches between a pair of semitones are realized only through the rhetorical device of glissando passages. Indeed, the transition between Kodály’s compositions when World War I was just beginning and Ligeti’s following the end of World War II is surprisingly smooth.

Most important is how each of these two composers explored new ways to advance the technical skills of the performer. In that frame of reference, Schwabe serves up a technically adept and rhetorically expressive account of all three of the compositions. Many listeners are likely to wonder why each of these compositions tends to be so unfamiliar. Cello students will probably not have that problem, and I would be only too happy to encounter all three of these pieces in future recital repertoires.

PIVOT Concludes with Dazzling Violin-Cello Music

Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Jay Campbell (from the San Francisco Performances event page for last night’s concert)

Last night in Herbst Theatre the San Francisco Performances PIVOT series concluded, as it began, with a duo of string instruments. Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and cellist Jay Campbell prepared a program that, like the first program of the series, explored the contrasts between past and present. This time, however, the “present” was about as immediate as one could expect, with the second performance of a new composition by Hungarian composer Márton Illés. (The first performance had taken place the preceding evening in Santa Barbara.)

The composition was the third in Illés’ Én-kör series of short pieces scored for two or three instruments. The first was written for two trumpets and horn, and the second was a duo for saxophone and harp. This latest piece thus involved Illés’ first venture into bowed strings for his project. From an information-theoretic point of view, the composition ranked a high entropy score, meaning simply that Illés was throwing at the attentive listener far more than could be conceived as order over the course of a single brief listening experience. It was the sort of piece that would have benefitted from having a second playing immediately after the first, but it was clear that both Kopatchinskaja and Campbell deserved a rest from the intensity they had brought to their performance.

Taken as a whole, the program was a well-balanced mixture of the familiar with the unfamiliar. Thus, the Illés premiere was preceded by Maurice Ravel’s duo sonata. Composing this piece seems to have been a challenge for Ravel. While it consists of four relatively short movements, he worked on the piece between 1920 and 1922 and was uncertain about the results. The piece is usually given a sober reading that plays up the textures of the violin and cello lines weaving among each other.

Last night’s reading, on the other hand, was anything but sober. The give-and-take between the violin and cello parts was attacked vigorously by both players with bowing techniques that bordered on the frighteningly violent. Yet the violence (if you can call it that) was more of a cartoonish nature; and, as the music progressed, the listener was drawn into the Looney Tunes world of Bugs Bunny consistently outwitting Elmer Fudd, except that each instrument got to alternate in taking the roles of Bugs and Elmer. As a result, the attentive listener could definitely appreciate the intricacy of all the technique behind Ravel’s score; but it was the off-the-wall rhetoric of the approach that Kopatchinskaja and Campbell took to their execution that made the experience both absorbing and hysterically funny in equal measure.

Much of the program involved contrasts between the distant past and more recent compositions. Thus, two of the pieces from the 24 duos that Jörg Widmann composed for violin and cello were framed between transcriptions of early two-part counterpoint documented in the eleventh-century Winchester Troper and a fantasia by Orlando Gibbons. (When was the last time that two different Widmann compositions were played in Herbst and Davies Symphony Hall, respectively, within days of each other?) Widmann’s capacity for wit may well have inspired the approach that Kopatchinskaja and Campbell brought to their Ravel performance (which immediately followed the Gibbons selection); and, as a result, there was very much a sense of contrast between the wild abandon of the recent past with the far more sobering rhetoric of the early compositions.

In the second half of the program, a transcription of a chanson by Guillaume de Machaut was framed by very early compositions by Iannis Xenakis and György Ligeti. Both of these pieces were short and drew upon folk sources, Greek and Hungarian, respectively. Thus, both of them tended to undermine the usual expectations that one brings to listening to either of these adventurous composers. However, Ligeti’s Hungarian “folk spirit” provided a retrospective reflection when the program concluded with Zoltán Kodály’s Opus 7 duo for violin and cello. Consequently, the entire program emerged as an intricate journey in which both past and present and contrasting emotional dispositions were elegantly interleaved.

The encore selection was taken from the keyboard music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Kopatchinskaja was not more specific; and, as many know, “Bach-the-son” composed a lot of keyboard music. The entire selection was played at a barely audible pizzicato, almost as if the performers decided to poke fun at the very convention of playing encores. (For that matter, there seemed to be no need to identify which of the many Gibbons fantasias was the one played during the first half of the program. Perhaps Kopatchinskaja and Campbell were being just as prankish about the very nature of a recital as they were in their approaches to performance.)

Marlboro Musicians Coming to Morrison Series

A Marlboro Music Festival performance (photograph by Marina Weber, from a WCRB Web page, courtesy of the Marlboro Music)

Musicians from Marlboro is a touring program created as an extension of the Marlboro Music Festival held every summer on the campus of Marlboro College in Vermont. The fifth concert in the 2018–2019 season of the Morrison Artists Series, presented by the College of Liberal and Creative Arts at San Francisco State University (SFSU), will present a quintet of Marlboro musicians participating in this season’s touring schedule. Collectively, these performers constitute a piano quintet: violinists Robin Scott and Tessa Lark, violist Kim Kashkashian, cellist Christopher Richter, and pianist Zoltán Fejérvári. However, the program they have prepared will not require them to play as a single group.

The “main attraction” of the event will be of local interest. The group will present the world premiere of a duo for violin and viola composed by Berkeley-based composer Ken Ueno. The more traditional selections on the program will be Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken XV/27 piano trio in C major, a serenade by Zoltán Kodály for two violins and viola, and Maurice Ravel’s 1914 piano trio in A minor, one of the outstanding pieces of chamber music composed during the twentieth century.

This concert will begin at 3 p.m. on Sunday, March 10. It will be held in the McKenna Theatre, which is in the Creative Arts Building at SFSU, a short walk from the SFSU Muni stop at the corner of 19th Avenue and Holloway Avenue. Tickets are free but advance registration is highly desirable. Reservations may be made, beginning on February 17, through the event page for this concert. As usual, there will be a pre-concert talk. On this occasion it will be presented by the entire group, and it will begin at 2 p.m. in Knuth Hall.

Adventurous Recital Deserves Remembering

Cellist Edward Luengo (second from right) with (left-to-right) teach Jean-Michel Fonteneau and accompanists Amy Chiu and Kevin Lee Sun (photograph by Kevin Kennedy, from Luengo’s Facebook site)

Every now and then one encounters a student recital so imaginatively conceived and so confidently executed that it burns its way into mind’s long-term memory. Such was the case last night in the Osher Salon at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where graduating senior Edward Luengo presented his end-of-term cello recital. With a repertoire that allowed for four musical partners and extended from the end of the eighteenth century to the first decade of the current one, Luengo provided himself with a richly diverse palette with which to exercise his technical and expressive skills, both of which were firing on all cylinders.

The major works in each half of the program offered a stimulating balance of the familiar and the unfamiliar. The second half was dominated by Johannes Brahms’ Opus 99 (second) sonata in F major. Separated by two decades, one might say (at the risk of sounding too reductive) that the first of the cello sonatas (Opus 38 in E minor) is highly introverted, while Opus 99 is vigorously extroverted. There is even an energetic buzz to the pizzicato passages in the second (Adagio affettuoso) that seems to invite the listener into what might have been taken as a private space.

The fact is that each movement has its own characteristic set of personality traits. Working effectively with accompanist Kevin Lee Sun, Luengo knew how to mine each movement for its own individual traits and then tie them all together in his journey through the sonata’s four movements. This was a delightful reminder that, no matter how many times one has previously encountered this sonata, there will always be fresh ways to enjoy the listening experience.

In the first half of the program, on the other hand, Luengo served up a far less familiar undertaking. While many cellists tend to establish their twentieth-century chops by performing Zoltán Kodály’s Opus 8 sonata for solo cello, Luengo opted for his Opus 7 duo for violin and cello, composed during the previous year (1914). Structured in three movements, this duo is as much of a wild ride as is the cello sonata, drawing upon folk sources to explore new domains of modernist rhetoric.

Luengo was joined by violinist Maria van der Sloot, who initially had a bit of a problem mustering up the necessary energy to balance with Luengo. Within only a few minutes, though, the two were confidently established on a level playing field. The listening experience was probably a “first encounter” for most of the audience; and I suspect I was not the only one wondering why it took so long for me to become acquainted with this piece.

The program opened with the eighteenth-century offering, Ludwig van Beethoven’s WoO 46, the set of seven variations on the duet “Bei Männern, welch Liebe fühlen” from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 620 opera The Magic Flute. Much of Mozart’s duet rhetoric was preserved in the interplay between cello and piano during the opening statement of the theme; however, even in his earliest works, Beethoven knew how to take his variations into unexpected regions. This demanded considerable virtuosity from both Luengo and his pianist, Amy Chiu. They may not have caught onto the many gestures of wit with which Beethoven spiced up his score, but their respective techniques were positively sparkling.

The most recent past was served up during the second half, which began with Guillaume Connesson’s 2008 suite, Les Chants de l’Agartha (the songs of Agartha, a mythical kingdom under the Mongolian desert). This selection made for an engaging complement to all of those imaginary beings lurking in Lera Auerbach’s performance of her own Labyrinth. However, Connesson was less cryptic in his approach to description, and each of his movements offered its own relatively brief account of an imagined setting.

The program concluded with “Encore,” composed in 2009 by Connesson’s colleague Jérôme Ducros. Composed in ternary form, the outer sections serve up large chunks of technically-demanding virtuosity taken to flamboyant extremes. The middle section allowed the cellist to catch his breath; but, ultimately, Ducros’ playful jab at concertizing ends up going on for too long. The opening section makes his point and could probably stand on its own just as well, if not better.

Luengo’s program also displayed his interest in French art song. The first half of his program included Pablo Casals’ arrangement of the first of three songs that Gabriel Fauré published as his Opus 7, “Après un rêve.” Calling this an arrangement is a bit generous. Casals left the piano part (played by Chiu) pretty much intact, having the cello follow the vocal line at the baritone level for the first verse and jumping an octave to the soprano level for the second.

The real encore that Luengo prepared was another French art song, Francis Poulenc’s “Les chemins de l’amour” (the paths of love). This was arranged for wind instrument and piano by Jacques Larocque. However, it is just as likely that Luengo followed Casals’ lead, since he again delivered the vocal line in two separate octaves, accompanied this time by Keisuke Nakagoshi. This selection amounted to an affectionate farewell from soloist to audience. Hopefully, this will turn out to be an au revoir, rather than an adieu!

The Jupiter Chamber Players Continue to Explore Unfamiliar Russian Repertoire

Since taking over the leadership of the Jupiter Chamber Players in 2002, Victor Romasevich has led his string quartet colleagues, Michael Jones (violin), Stephen Levintow (viola), and Paul Rhodes (cello), on some fascinating journeys of repertoire discovery. A major path along that journey has involved the music of Iosif Andriasov, with whom Romasevich studied both violin and viola. Past Jupiter concerts have programmed a generous share of Andriasov’s compositions, as well as music by his son Arshak.

Yesterday afternoon Jupiter returned to the Old First Concerts series at Old First Church. The elder Andriasov was again included in the program, but this time the historical perspective addressed the opposite direction. Rather than considering the relationship between father and son, the program offered music by Evgeny Golubev, who taught the elder Andriasov between 1958 and 1963. (Alfred Schnittke studied with Golubev between 1953 and 1958.) Golubev’s music filled the second half of the program with a performance of his Opus 39 quintet for harp and string quartet in C minor. The string quartet was joined by Olga Ortenberg Rakitchenkov, harpist in the San Francisco Opera Orchestra. (Golubev’s Wikipedia page describes this piece as “one of Golubev’s few works that are still occasionally performed.”)

It is understandable that Opus 39 is only “occasionally” performed. Bringing a capable harpist together with a string quartet interested in new repertoire is not always an easy matter, particularly when than “new” repertoire is over half a century old. However, yesterday’s performance made a strong case that this is music that deserves more attention. The quintet was composed in 1953, the year in which Joseph Stalin (as well as Sergei Prokofiev) died. As is well known, composers did not fare well under Stalin’s tyrannical rule; but his death led to a period of leadership uncertainty, which did not make things much better.

It is thus surprising how freshly optimistic Opus 39 is, even with its minor key signature. From a technical point of view, the piece is particularly notable for how perceptive Golubev was in writing for the harp and in finding ways to balance it against the string quartet. The result provides an opportunity to appreciate the extensive breadth of possibilities for virtuosity coming from the harp, all of which blend in with the strings with impeccable balance. There is even a delightfully amusing exchange in which each quartet voice plucks out its own pizzicato motif, returning to bowing only after the harp makes its “Me, too!” entrance.

Andriasov himself was represented with only three short pieces for cello and piano, for which Romasevich shifted from violin to piano to accompany Rhodes. Each involved a composition from a different time in Andriasov’s life, rearranged for cello and piano. The earliest of these (1955) was written for flute and piano, and second (1970) was for oboe and chamber orchestra, and the third (1981) was for mixed a cappella choir. Each of these had its own characteristic approach to melodic line, which made the transition to cello and piano a relatively smooth one. However, compared to Andriasov’s other work, these were vignettes, perhaps out of recognition that Golubev was the focus of the afternoon.

The program began with two more familiar composers. The first of these was a serenade for two violins and viola composed by Zoltán Kodály (his Opus 12) between 1919 and 1920. This was written after Kodály’s ethnomusicological field work, much of which was conducted with Béla Bartók; and one is readily aware of the field sources, particularly in the energetic concluding Vivo movement. Romasevich, Levintow, and Rhodes then performed the third (in C minor) of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 9 string trios. This was a capable enough reading; but it tended not to dwell on many of the witty turns through which Beethoven was clearly trying to one-up his former teacher Joseph Haydn. However, even in the presence of these more familiar composers, it was the discovery of Golubev’s quintet that made yesterday afternoon’s journey so worth the while.

Strobe will Give its Next Recital at Music on the Hill

This past February 2 marked the first anniversary of Strobe, one of the more unique chamber ensembles one is likely to encounter. The group was formed by cellist Krisanthy Desby to explore the repertoire for oboe and strings. (The name is a mash-up of the nouns “strings” and “oboe.”) The oboist of the group is Laura Griffiths, joined by violinist Stephanie Bibbo and violist Caroline Lee, as well as Desby.

This ensemble will be performing their next program in the Music on the Hill concert series. Music on the Hill was formed in 1998 with the goal of presenting cutting-edge chamber music programming. It therefore seems appropriate that Strobe will use this occasion to offer the premiere of their first commissioned work, as piece not yet titled by Vincent Russo. They will also revisit their debut with a performance of the second (in C major) of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s five K. 439b divertimenti. According to the Neue Ausgabe, Mozart scored this for three basset horns, but Strobe plays it as a trio for oboe, violin, and cello. [updated 3/7, 3:40 p.m.: The Mozart selection has been changed to the K. 370 oboe quartet in F major.] Similarly, they will perform their own arrangement of Zoltán Kodály’s 1905 intermezzo for string trio. They will also perform Gordon Jacob’s 1938 oboe quartet, dedicated to the famous British oboist Leon Goossens.

This concert will take place at 7 p.m. on Sunday, March 12. The venue for Music on the Hill concerts is St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church, located in Diamond Heights. The street address is 101 Gold Mine Drive, which is at the corner of Diamond Heights Boulevard. General admission will be $18 with a $12 rate for seniors aged 65 and older and students up to eighteen years old. Children aged twelve and younger will be admitted at no charge. Tickets may be purchased in advance online through a Brown Paper Tickets event page.

Pianist Thibaudet Brings Delightfully Sparkling Ravel to Davies

This afternoon in Davies Symphony Hall the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) gave the first of this week’s three subscription concerts. The conductor was Lionel Bringuier, currently Chief Conductor and Music Director of the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, who made his SFS debut in February of 2014. His program followed the usual overture-concerto-symphony format. The concerto soloist was pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, a frequent visitor to Davies, playing Maurice Ravel’s piano concerto in G major.

Thibaudet is one of the most reliable of the SFS guest artists, and he was definitely in form this afternoon. Not only did each of his rapid-fire passages sparkle with a dazzling light; but he also understood that such passages were textural, rather than thematic. Indeed, with the exception of the almost excessively lyric solo that he took at the beginning of the second movement (which he endowed with neither too much nor too little expressiveness), one might almost think that Ravel conceived of his entire concerto almost as a mural of diverse textures, some of which blend while others clash with each other.

One of the reasons that Thibaudet was so effective in presenting this concerto is that he has a keen sense of George Gershwin’s approach to jazz, which informs his understanding of how Ravel refracted that approach. It is important to remember that Ravel’s concerto was written a little over half a decade after both “Rhapsody in Blue” and Gershwin’s more extended concerto in F major. Indeed, while it is clear that Gershwin’s concerto is in the major mode, Gershwin himself called it simply “Concerto in F;” and, almost as an explicit nod to Gershwin, Ravel called his concerto, “Concerto in G.” Note that verb “refracted,” though; Ravel was not trying to follow in Gershwin’s footsteps but to blaze a new trail with the benefit of the light that Gershwin’s music had shed. The result is one of the landmark piano concertos of the twentieth century; and Thibaudet, working as effectively as could be imagined with Bringuier, knew exactly how to establish not only the significance of this music but all the delights that come from listening to it.

Bringuier programmed this concerto to follow another equally skillful act of refraction. Zoltán Kodály’s “Dances of Galánta.” Composed in 1933 (only two years after Ravel’s concerto) this “overture” selection similarly entailed a composer applying his personal stamp to source material he had discovered. In Kodály’s case that material came from his ethnomusicological field work with fellow composer and compatriot Béla Bartók. Indeed, it is almost impossible to listen to some of the rapid-fire passages for strings, particularly at the beginning of “Dances of Galánta,” and not think of how Bartók turned that same device to his own purposes in his later orchestral writing. Furthermore, the palette of instrumental sonorities is as diverse as Ravel’s; and, where Ravel had a tendency to work with one texture at a time, Kodály had a gift for overlaying separate textures to create new ones. In this respect Bringuier’s technique as a conductor could not have been better in leading the attentive listener through those textures, revealing how Kodály had synthesized them.

The symphony selection on the program took the audience back to Ludwig van Beethoven with his Opus 60 (fourth) symphony in B-flat major. Those looking for “unifying traits” would have found them in the last of the four movements, where the intense dynamics of rapid-fire string work paralleled Kodály’s approach at the very beginning. However, this is also a symphony of sharp contrasts between extremes; and Bringuier knew exactly how to register those contrasts without taking any of those extremes to excess. This was a stimulatingly fresh approach to a Beethoven symphony that deserves more attention than it seems to get, and Bringuier could not have been a better advocate.

Tickets are still available for the remaining two performance of this program, and this is definitely an event that is not to be missed.

Next Month Will Offer Some Interesting Conservatory and “Post-Conservatory” Options

Friday, December 9, will provide the first opportunity of the season to attend a fully-staged full-length opera production at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM). Ironically, the first performance will overlap with one of the most impressive achievements by SFCM graduates. Those who will find this a hard choice to make may take comfort in the fact that the opera will be given a second performance.

That opera will be Benjamin Britten’s Opus 54 The Turn of the Screw. Myfanwy Piper prepared the libretto based on Henry James’ novella of the same title, and the opera was structured in two acts with a prologue. This is a bold effort to honor the way James had structured his text, deliberately keeping the reader in doubt as to just who is narrating this tale. (The screenplay by William Archibald and Truman Capote for The Innocents, on the other hand, chose to “stick to the story,” ceding the “authority of the narrator” to the camera. While the film has many virtues, fidelity to James’ intentions is not one of them!)

Without spoiling anything, it is important to note that Piper and Britten put significant thought into not only presenting but also casting the prologue in preparation for the plot that will unfold over the course of the following two acts. It is just as important to observe that the entire unfolding has been realized musically in theme-and-variations form. The theme (whose intervals oscillate back and forth in a “screw-like” pattern) is stated in the opening scene; and all following scenes account for fifteen variations. Britten scored the music for one-to-a-part performances of first and second violin, viola, cello, bass, flute (doubling on piccolo and bass flute), oboe (doubling on cor anglais), clarinet (doubling on bass clarinet), bassoon, horn, harp, percussion, and piano (doubling on celesta). However, for all its admirable cerebral qualities, the opera itself offers some of Britten’s most intense approaches to the dramatic qualities of his source text.

The Turn of the Screw will be given two performances, the first at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, December 9, and the second at 2 p.m. on Sunday, December 11. SFCM is located at 50 Oak Street, a short walk from the Van Ness Muni station, and the performance will take place in the Concert Hall. Details have not yet been released regarding either the casting or the production team. Both performances will be free, but reservations will be required. Reservations may be made online through separate Google Forms pages created for the Friday and Sunday performances.

That Friday evening will also be the date for the second concert in the 2016–2017 season of One Found Sound (OFS). This ensemble was conceived as a collaborative group with a repertoire selected democratically by all members, and its four founders knew each other as SFCM students. As has been the case in the past, the program for this concert will highlight solo performances by orchestra members and well as non-standard groups of players. The featured soloists will be Jesse Barrett on cor anglais and Brad Hogarth on trumpet in a performance of Aaron Copland’s “Quiet City,” a ten-minute composition based on incidental music that Copland wrote for a performance of a play of the same name by Irwin Shaw. Copland scored the two soloists to play against the accompaniment of a string ensemble. The “non-standard group” will be a double wind quintet (with a cor anglais in one of the two groups instead of an oboe) performing George Enescu’s Opus 14 in D major. The program will conclude with the full ensemble playing Zoltán Kodály’s suite entitled Dances of Galánta.

This performance will begin at 8 p.m. on Friday, December 9. The venue will be Heron Arts, located in SoMa at 7 Heron Street on the block between 7th Street and 8th Street. General admission tickets are being sold for $20 with a $45 VIP rate for reserved seating that includes an invitation to an OFS open rehearsal. Tickets may be purchased online in advance through an Eventbrite event page.

Two New Piano Collective Pianists Explore Composers and their Influences

Yesterday afternoon two of the members of the New Piano Collective returned to Old First Church to present a recital entitled Old Wine in New Bottles for the Old First Concerts series.The performers were Founder and Artistic Director Jeffrey LaDeur and Johnandrew Slominski. The program consisted of four “sets” with Slominski playing the two “middle” sets while LaDeur handled the opening and closing.

In a musical context the phrase “old wine” tends to refer to pre-Classical periods; and those influences definitely figured significantly in the organization of the program. However, Slominski’s second set involved a far more recent influence, while the closing set shifted attention to folk influences. Slominski’s recent influence was Anton Webern, and the composer being influenced by Zygmunt Krauze. Born in 1938, Krauze is a highly prolific Polish composer whose name has yet to register with most American concert-goers with the impact of Witold Lutosławski or Krzysztof Penderecki. Slominski played two short pieces composed in 1958 that Krauze called simply “inventions.” While the title was clearly a nod to Johann Sebastian Bach, Krauze apparently described the pieces as providing a pointillistic foretaste of the music of Anton Webern.

Webern had, of course, died in 1945, over a decade prior to Krauze composing these pieces. However, Krauze’s description may have been his prankish way of reminding his listeners that Webern’s music continued to have limited public appeal, even ten years after his death. (Michael Tilson Thomas has yet to conduct Webern’s Opus 6 orchestra pieces without the Davies audience erupting into a wave of nervous coughs.) Nevertheless, Krauze’s inventions really do provide that foretaste, orienting the attentive listener for the experience of Webern’s Opus 27 “Variations for piano” by offering a “rhetorical preparation” over a shorter duration (yes, it is possible to write pieces shorter than those Webern wrote) and with more transparent counterpoint.

However, Slominski had his own prankishness by not following the Krauze inventions with Webern’s piano piece. Instead, he offered a smooth segue into the four mazurkas in Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 17. Many of the Chopin mazurkas are delightful gems of brevity in which duration never goes beyond a ternary form with two short sections. The mazurka takes a unique approach to triple meter. The late choreographer James Waring used to remind his dancers that, in a Chopin mazurka, the second beat was the important one; and Slominski clearly knew how to present a mazurka as something other than “another kind of waltz.” Perhaps because of that brevity, the shift from Krauze’s atonality to Chopin’s lush harmonies (even on short time scales) turned out to be a smooth one, making for the most imaginative gesture of the program.

LaDeur used his first set to continue with his project to perform all of the piano music by Claude Debussy. His selection was Pour le piano, a suite whose three movements are a prelude, a sarabande, and a toccata. The link to the “old wine” came by first playing the Sarabande movement from Jean-Philippe Rameau’s 1728 collection Nouvelles Suites de Pièces de Clavecin (new suites of keyboard pieces). However, the Rameau sarabande was coupled with a gavotte for which he had composed six highly virtuoso variations (doubles), a perfect way to prepare the listener for the wealth of thoroughly “pianistic” virtuosity that flows from the pages of Debussy’s suite. The coupling of Debussy to Rameau thus offered both a logical historical transition and an opportunity to take in two highly distinctive approaches to elaborate keyboard writing.

Debussy composed Pour le piano in 1901, and Slominski began the following set with Maurice Ravel’s three-movement sonatina, which he composed between 1903 and 1905. This piece shares much of Debussy’s approach to retrospection, concluding again with a toccata, which is preceded, this time, with a minuet. However, as Slominsky observed in his introductory remarks, Ravel was also interested in an integrated coherence of his three movements, the sort of “bottle” one would never have encountered for any of the eighteenth-century vintages! He also coupled his Ravel with another two Chopin pieces, the Opus 57 berceuse and the Opus 60 barcarolle. Both of these are far simpler in structure but abundantly rich in elaboration, providing a fascinating contrast to Ravel’s more severe approach to structural integrity.

LaDeur concluded the program with music from two consecutive centuries influenced by common folk elements. The folk elements were Hungarian, and the first selection was the third of Franz Liszt’s nineteen “Hungarian Rhapsody” compositions. Liszt did not necessarily appropriate specific folk themes, but this particular rhapsody seems to have been written as a deliberate evocation of the folk instruments. This was followed by Zoltán Kodály’s “Dances of Marosszék,” which he composed between 1923 and 1927 and then orchestrated in 1929. Here, again, Kodály invented his own “source material” to depict what he described as an “imaginary” time. The Hungarian spirit then spilled over to the encore when Slominski joined LaDeur for the four-hand version of the fifth of the Hungarian dances composed by Johannes Brahms, adding an extra jolt to the vigor of LaDeur’s solo work.

One Found Sound Announces Their 2016–2017 Concert Season

This coming October the One Found Sound chamber orchestra will begin their fourth season. Originally founded by four students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the group was conceived as a collaborative ensemble with a repertoire selected democratically by all members. The result has been programming that covers a wide range of genres with the intimacy of Leoš Janáček’s wind sextet “Youth” at one extreme and the full forces required for Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 56 “triple” concerto in C major at the other. Programming for the new season was announced at the beginning of this month, and that breadth of scope will again be on display. In addition there will again some adventurous choices that are likely to lead listeners down unfamiliar but intriguing paths.

All concerts will be held at 8 p.m. on Friday evenings. However, the performances will again be a “moveable feast” involving two different venues in the SOMA (SOuth of MArket) section of San Francisco. Here are the specifics:

October 7

Monument SF, 140 9th Street

Bohuslav Martinů, nonet for wind quintet, string trio, and double bass

Richard Wagner, Siegfried Idyll

Joseph Haydn, symphony in G major, Hoboken I/88

December 9

Heron Arts, 7 Heron Street

George Enescu, Dixtuor (dectet) in D major for winds, Opus 14

Aaron Copland, Quiet City, for trumpet, English horn, and string orchestra

Zoltán Kodály, Dances of Galánta

February 3

Heron Arts, 7 Heron Street

Maurice Ravel, Introduction and Allegro for harp, flute, clarinet, and string quartet

Ottorino Respighi, Ancient Airs and Dances, Suite No. 1

Claude Debussy, Petite Suite (orchestrated by Henri Büsser)

Season tickets are now on sale. The Silver tickets provide VIP seating for each of the above three concerts for $125. There is also a Gold level at $200 for which VIP seating comes along with acknowledgement in each of the programs and invitations to pre-concert receptions. Single tickets are also on sale for the first concert at $20 for general admission and $45 for the VIP section, which includes an invitation to attend an open rehearsal. All four of these options are currently available for purchase from a single Eventbrite event page. In addition there are Eventbrite event pages for purchasing single tickets to the December and February concerts.

In addition the Third Annual Gala will be held in the spring. Once again, Heron Arts will host the event, which will begin at 7 p.m. on Saturday, April 28. Further details will be announced later in the season.

Keyboard Music for Solo Instrument

One of the more fascinating sequences in Michael Lawrence’s BACH & friends documentary finds Richard Stoltzman in a church sanctuary with extremely live acoustics performing what appears to be his own transcription of the “chromatic fantasia” from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 903.  This is probably one of the few occasions in which I felt that those church acoustics were actually enhanced the qualities of a really dense melodic line;  but I realized that this was not the first time I had heard an effort to reduce this particular instance of “all-finger” keyboard music to a single voice.  Trey Gunn had a rather awesome arrangement of his own that he would play on his own Chapman Stick in performances with Robert Fripp, one of which was captured on video.  This is clearly elaborate multi-voice music;  but the multiple voices can be embedded in a single melodic line, as we encounter in Bach’s sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin.  Indeed, that spirit probably motivated Zoltán Kodály to do his transcription of the fantasy for solo viola.

All this reminded me of a far more impressive effort to transcribe keyboard music for a single-voice instrument.  Lewis Porter’s biography of John Coltrane has a quotation from pianist James “Hen Gates” Foreman about one particular episode on the road with Trane in 1949.  This is the part that leapt out at me:

He took my Hanon and Czerny piano exercise books, and some kind of way he was able to finger his horn to play these notes.  I couldn’t understand that.  In fact, all of the musicians in the band were amazed.  They couldn’t believe that he would make a lot of the notes.

Did Stoltzman know that Trane did this?  If so, I wonder if it inspired him to attempt the same!

Slighting Bartók?

It occurred to me this morning, while listening to a recording of Béla Bartók’s fifth string quartet, the first of the Bartók quartets I ever heard, that I have not yet reviewed a performance of any of these quartets on Examiner.com.  Indeed, it appears that my only recent account of a performance of Bartók’s music on my San Francisco platform involved the New Century Chamber Orchestra performance of his string orchestra version of six short Romanian folk dances by the New Century Chamber Orchestra at the kick-off concert for their eight-city tour of the Midwest and California this past January.  This is not to suggest that Bartók has been unduly neglected in this city.  The Takás Quartet performed his fourth quartet when they visited last October;  and I even recommended Robert Greenberg’s latest series of lecture-demonstrations in conjunction with the Alexander String Quartet, covering the quartets of both Bartók and his colleague Zoltán Kodály, as an ideal “Christmas gift for the serious listener.”  (The last of these presentations will take place on May 14 and focus on the last two Bartók quartets.)

I am fully aware that concert programming is very much at the mercy of what is fashionable.  Bartók was all the rage when I was a student, but for most audiences that counts as ancient history.  Those who were around may not have memories as vivid as my own.  Still, given the interest that still forms around the music of György Ligeti, one might think that some of that interest might extend to Ligeti’s own listening experiences and the role that Bartók must have played in them.

The New Flamboyance

Nicola Luisotti composed an interesting program for his conducting debut with the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall this week, shortly before becoming Music Director of the San Francisco Opera. The first half was all from the twentieth century: Zoltán Kodály's 1933 suite of dances based on material he had collected in the Hungarian town of Galánta and Ernest Bloch's "Schelomo" with Michael Grebanier as cello soloist. The second half represented the nineteenth century with Johannes Brahms fourth symphony in E minor (Opus 98).

As an opera conductor, Luisotti has a clear sense of music as drama; and, as I have written elsewhere, this was particularly evident in the perceptive interpretation of "Schelomo" that he developed with Grebanier. However, he also cuts a very flamboyant figure, never afraid of highly communicative facial expressions and the broadest of gestures. His style thus contrasts radically with, for example, the "Russian subtleties" of conductors like Valery Gergiev and Yuri Temirkanov. Both of these Russians understand the power of body language. Indeed, neither of them uses a baton, as opposed to that rather long stick that Luisotti wielded; but I am not sure that I would call either Gergiev or Temirkanov "flamboyant," while in Luisotti's case the "show" seems to be coming as much from the podium as from the ensemble of the players themselves.

It may be that my impression of Luisotti on Saturday night was influenced by my having spent the afternoon watching Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Berliner Philharmoniker in a concert at the beginning of this month now in the archives of the orchestra's new Digital Concert Hall. Dudamel's debut with the San Francisco Symphony about a year ago was also a closely-watched occasion; and Dudamel brought more than the usual share of flamboyance to that occasion. His Berlin program consisted of Sergei Rachmaninoff's "Isle of the Dead," Igor Stravinsky's violin concerto (with soloist Viktoria Mullova), and Sergei Prokofiev's fifth symphony. This kind of "experience base" made it difficult for me to approach Luisotti's performance without drawing parallels.

On the positive side both conductors worked well with their respective soloists (as Dudamel had done in San Francisco), resulting in a performance of perceptive understanding (regardless of the radical differences between Bloch and Stravinsky). At the same time both brought considerable exhibitionism to the symphony performances. This worked well enough for Dudamel, since Prokofiev's symphony is already a pretty exhibitionistic piece of work. Brahms is another matter. He is certainly capable of summoning intense emotion, but he usually restrains himself from excesses. To be fair to Luisotti, the sound of his Brahms was quite effective; but the performance left me wondering just what role his body language had played in achieving that result. Of course the other parallel involving these two conductors is that they are both young and are both probably still finding their respective voices for the many different regions of the repertoire they must command. Both quests will take some time, and it should be interesting to follow them.

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!