Four LCCE Players Visit SF Public Library

Early yesterday evening, as part of its Workshops & Education program, the Main branch of the San Francisco Public Library hosted a visit by four of the members of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE). They presented a one-hour program entitled Deep Ecology and Deep Listening. This began with a piano trio performance of “Tree/Peace” by Pauline Oliveros, played by violinist Anna Presler, Leighton Fong on cello, and pianist Allegra Chapman. Only one other selection involved more than one performer, Amy Beach’s “Romance,” which was scored for violin and piano.

Hildegard of Bingen with nuns, possibly leading them in chant (source unknown, public domain, from a Wikimedia Commons Web page)

Stacey Pelinka delivered two solo flute performances, which were as engaging as they were contrasting. The first of these was an instrumental account of the monodic chant of Hildegard of Bingen: “O viridissima virga, Ave.” The absence of voice detracted from the rich semantics of the text, but Pelinka’s account of the vocal line was both compelling and engaging. This contrasted sharply with her account of “Ainava ar putniem” (landscape with bird), composed by Pēteris Vasks, a bold effort to capture natural sounds through a solo instrument. This was preceded by another recent European selection, “Nocturne,” composed for solo violin by Kaija Saariaho in 1994. The solo piano offering was “Ice Calf” by Monica Chew, who is currently based in Oakland.

Whether or not this program reflected ecological connotations (or denotations) was left as an exercise for the listener. Personally, I was more inclined to reflect on the music, rather than the titles. I was particularly struck by the sensitivity of the contemporary composers’ efforts to explore diversities of sonorities, and I was impressed by how the LCCE players rose to the challenges of those sonorities. Taken as a whole, this was an hour well spent venturing into unfamiliar territories.

SFPL to Host Free LCCE Concert

The LCCE musicians that will perform at SFPL: Allegra Chapman (piano), Stacey Pelinka (flute), Leighton Fong (cello), and Anna Presler (violin) (photographs by Miles Caliboso and Bonnie Rae Mills, from the SFPL event page for the concert being discussed)

At the end of this month, the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) will host a performance by members of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE) as part of their Workshops & Education program. The Main branch of the Library, which is located in the Civic Center, a short walk from City Hall, will present a concert entitled Deep Ecology and Deep Listening. Each of the four selections on the program will involve the exploration of innovative sonorities, conceived to reflect different aspects of the natural world.

The program will begin with “Tree/Peace,” which Pauline Oliveros composed for violin, cello, and piano, making it one of her most conventional approaches to instrumentation. This will be followed by the solo piano composition “Ice Calf” by Monica Chew, who is currently based in Oakland. While Oliveros was one of the most adventurous composers of the last century, “Ice Calf” was given its first performance on June 26, 2021. The program will then lapse back into the twentieth century with a solo violin performance of “Nocturne,’ composed by Kaija Saariaho in 1994. The final work on the program will be “Ainava ar putniem” (landscape with birds), written for solo flute by Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks (who happens to be my senior by only about three months).

SFPL has created a Web page for this event. It will begin at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, July 31. The entire program will be performed without intermission and is expected to last for 45 minutes. SFPL does not charge for admission to any of its facilities or events (of course).

New Piano Trio Contemplates Time

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Jensen Artists)

Today marks the release of Sonic Alchemy, a new album of performances by members of a piano trio, violinist YuEun Kim, pianist Mina Gajić, and cellist Coleman Itzkoff. It is worth noting that Kim will probably be familiar to those following early music in the Bay Area. She is a recipient of the Jeffrey Thomas Award from American Bach Soloists (ABS); and, in addition to performing with that ensemble, she has also played with Voices of Music. This new album, however, marks a significant departure from the repertoire for those ensembles.

Indeed, the album contents consists of what those of us with a mathematical background would call a “bimodal distribution.” That simply means that there are two “clusters” from two different eras in music history. The earlier of those “clusters” consists of two compositions by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. These are his two fantasias for solo piano, K. 397 in D minor and K. 475 in C minor. The second “cluster” is shared by two Eastern European composers, Estonian Arvo Pärt and Latvian Pēteris Vasks.

The essay found at the beginning of the album’s booklet is entitled “How do we even measure time?” Addressing that question is no easy matter, but the question is certainly relevant to the “nuts and bolts” associated with both performing and listening to music. Nevertheless, trying to answer that question is the tip of an iceberg, whose depth extends further than one can see if limited only to sea level and above. Thus, before we try to measure time, we need to understand the basic properties of what Edmund Husserl called “time consciousness;” and anyone that has ever tried to approach Husserl casually knows how difficult this undertaking is.

Less intimidating is merely trying to understand how we account for the act of listening. Where the Mozart fantasias are concerned, this becomes a matter of recognizing how each piece amounts to a series of episodes; and what seems to matter most are the transitions from one episode to the next. Most important was that Mozart was not afraid to compose very abrupt transitions.

On the other hand both Pärt and Vasks have composed music that seems to be grounded in a rhetoric of stillness. Listening to this album becomes a journey of discovering that there are many different kinds of stillness. Indeed, Pärt takes a call-and-response approach to stillness. That approach basically consists of taking the Adagio movement from Mozart’s K. 280 piano sonata in F major as a call and then recognizing a response to it.

Mind you, many are likely to shy away from music that appeals to cerebral qualities. Such would-be listeners should rest assured that one can listen to the tracks of this new release without fear of being overwhelmed by the “deep end.” However, those that decide that the album deserves more than a single listening experience will probably begin to recognize that, when taken as a whole, the recording takes some innovative approaches to the interactions between foreground and background. In other words, once you put your toe in these waters, the music itself may persuade you to wade into a greater depth!

Kristina Vårlid “On Location” for Omni Streaming

Readers may recall that, for the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts, the New Year began with the latest video to be added to its Omni On Location series. The video was made at the Sound & Wave Studios in Warsaw, Poland; and it featured Polish guitarist Mateusz Kowalski performing an arrangement (presumably his own) of Maurice Ravel’s “Pavane pour une infante défunte.” On the principle that one good “import” deserves another, Omni announced this morning that the month will conclude with another European On Location video.

Norwegian guitarist Kristina Vårlid (photograph courtesy of the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts)

This one will take place in the Jacobuskerk in the Dutch village of Rolde. The guitarist will be Kristina Vårlid, who is from Stavanger in Norway. Her reputation includes awards from festivals in both Europe and Asia.

In that context she has prepared an “international” program for her video. She will begin in Greece with “Images from a Sea,” composed by Thodoris Theodoroudis. Born in 2000, he is the youngest composer on the program. This will be followed by a three-movement sonata by Pēteris Vasks (born in 1946) entitled “The Sonata of Loneliness.” The final composer on the program will also be the most familiar: Joaquín Rodrigo (1901–1999). He will be represented by “Junto al Generalife” (near the Generalife, which is outside the walls of the Alhambra), composed in 1959.

This performance will be streamed through the Omni Foundation’s YouTube channel. The premiere will be live-streamed at noon this coming Sunday, January 22. The YouTube Web page for viewing has already been created. There is no charge for admission, which means that these performances are made possible only by the viewers’ donations. A Web page has been created for processing contributions, and any visits made prior to the streaming itself will be most welcome.

Friction Quartet to Open Season in Noe Valley

At the end of next week, Friction Quartet will open their 2022–2023 season with a program of music by five living composers. For those unfamiliar with the ensemble, the performers are violinists Otis Harriel and Kevin Rogers (sharing first chair), violist Rachyl Martinez, and cellist Doug Machiz. The major work on the program will be Peteris Vasks’ fourth string quartet.

The remainder of the program will be devoted to shorter selections. One of these will be the world premiere of “la terre est bleue comme une orange” (the earth is as blue as an orange), composed by Geoffrey Gordon and commissioned by Friction. The other composers will be Alex Dowling (“Live Drawing”), Annika Socolofsky (“The Meantime”), and Andrew Rodriguez (“A Song About Unity”), all of whom were supported by the Friction Commissioning Initiative III.

The performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, September 23. The venue will be the Noe Valley Ministry, located at 1021 Sanchez Street, between 23rd Street and Elizabeth Street, a short walk from the Muni stops at the corner of 24th Street and Church Street. General admission will be $30. There will also be a livestream feed, for which viewers can set their own price. An event page has been created for processing all ticket orders. Proof of vaccination and masks will be required for the safety of all attending the performance in Noe Valley.

Gidon Kremer on Warner: Twentieth Century

As was observed at the beginning of this month, the lion’s share of performances offered in the Warner Classics release Gidon Kremer: The Warner Collection consists of works composed during the twentieth century. While this involves many of the “usual suspects,” such as Igor Stravinsky, Jean Sibelius, Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith, Alban Berg, and Benjamin Britten, Kremer was far more interested in using the recording studio to bring attention to composers that were less known when he was preparing programs for his albums. This was a bold move, because much of this music challenged listeners with its thorny rhetoric, while other selections came off as decidedly remote from concert hall settings.

Original album cover showing Gidon Kremer, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Yuri Bashmet (from the Amazon.com Web page)

The largest share of those thorny offerings came from the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke. Like many, I was unaware of the composer until the emergence of compact discs and the release of The Alfred Schnittke Edition by BIS Records, based in Sweden. As previously observed, Kremer’s performances of Schnittke’s music can also be found in his albums for the Deutsche Grammophon (DG) 22-CD box set of concerto recordings; but the Warner collection offers a far more extensive and diverse account of that composer’s catalog. There is even an element of “star power” in the CD that has Kremer playing two Schnittke selections with violist Yuri Bashmet and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

The other composer to receive generous attention is Astor Piazzolla. One might say that Rostropovich was responsible for bringing Piazzolla out of the Argentinian tango dance halls when the latter composed “Le Grand Tango” for the former. Rostropovich gave the work its first performance in 1990, and later in that decade Kremer would work with several arrangers to prepare “concert versions” of Piazzolla’s music.

Ironically, the most familiar of those undertakings, an arrangement by Leonid Desyatnikov best known as The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, is not included in the Warner anthology. Instead, Kremer was involved in a project to record far less familiar music by Piazzolla, the tango operita (tango opera) “María de Buenos Aires,” which was first performed in Buenos Aires on May 8, 1968. Readers may recall that a recording of this one-act opera was discussed on this site in March of 2019. The instrumentation followed that of Piazzolla’s quintet for the tango halls: bandoneon, violin, piano, guitar, and bass. Desyatnikov’s arrangement keeps the bandoneon, violin, piano, and bass but then adds flute, viola, cello, and percussion. Sadly, neither a libretto nor a synopsis is provided; and the titles of the tableaux (cuadros) are given only in Spanish.

The entire opera fills two CDs. There is then a third CD of Piazzolla compositions provided by three different arrangers. Desyatnikov’s contribution is a transcription for violin and string orchestra of “Tango Ballet,” which Piazzolla originally composed for string quartet. This is followed by “Concierto del Angel,” transcribed by Rolf Gupta for violin, bandoneon, bass, piano, and string orchestra. As was the case with Four Seasons, this is a compilation of four individual Piazzolla compositions. The final transcription is by José Bragato, who arranged Four Seasons for piano trio. “Tres piezas para orquesta de camera,” scored for piano and string orchestra, is an arrangement of three short pieces for cello and piano, which were collected and published as Piazzolla’s Opus 4.

Desyatnikov’s original music can be found on an album entitled Le Cinema. The album, as a whole, includes both original compositions and arrangements. Kremer performs with pianist Oleg Maisenberg, along with Andrey Boreyko conducting the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the orchestra originally founded in 1946 by American occupation forces. Piazzolla’s music can also be found on this album, along with two selections by Nino Rota (Federico Fellini’s preferred composer). This album also marks the only appearances of Dmitri Shostakovich, Darius Milhaud, and Toru Takemitsu.

The other “themed” album is entitled From my Home. “Home” refers not only to Latvia, where Kremer was born, but also to the other two Baltic states, Lithuania and Estonia. While Kremer would subsequently champion Arvo Pärt in recordings he released on ECM, this earlier album includes only the 1992 version of “Fratres,” scored for violin, string orchestra (the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie), and percussion. Pēteris Vasks (also Latvian) can be found on this album with his “Musica Dolorosa,” scored for string orchestra; but there is also an entire CD devoted to two Vasks compositions. This is the only CD in the collection in which Kremer is performing with his Kamerata Baltica.

Taken as a whole, this collection of twentieth-century music is a mixed bag. Some may find this frustrating for the unfamiliarity of much of the content.  Others will laud the opportunity to encounter unknown compositions by barely-known (if at all) composers. Such novelty is most accessible when useful background information has been provided, but the text of the accompanying booklet offers more information about Kremer than about his repertory choices. The good news is that there is much on the Internet to satisfy those more interested in the music itself.

LCCE to Conclude Season in Cyberspace

Poster for the planned LCCE concert showing violinist Anna Presler socially distanced from her colleagues (based on the image from the Web page for the concert)

It has been some time since I have written an actual preview article. To the contrary, from the beginning of March, when I reported on the first wave of closures and cancellations, I realized that I had shifted attention from announcing what would happen to announcing what would not happen. I gradually withdrew from keeping these reports up to date, simply because they amounted to writing more-of-the-same reports. I assumed that anyone that had found this site would also know enough to consult Web sites with the latest word on which events were being cancelled.

However, next month the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE) has decided to present a scheduled concert in cyberspace. The final concert of the season will still be presented on its scheduled date, Monday, June 1, at 7:30 p.m. If conditions allow, the performance will take place, as scheduled, in the Recital Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM). However, the program has been changed to accommodate the possibility that the performers will play from their homes, meaning that all selections will involve either solo or duo performances.

This means that the originally scheduled program, Living in Color, will be replaced by one entitled Sheltering Music. Pianist Eric Zivian will give two solo performances: Ludwig van Beethoven’s two-movement Opus 78 sonata in F-sharp major (yes, the key of six sharps) and “Vogel als Prophet” (bird as prophet), the seventh of the nine pieces that Robert Schumann collected for his Opus 82 Waldszenen (forest scenes). Flutist Stacey Pelinka will present another “avian” solo selection, “Ainava ar putniem” (landscape with birds) by Pēteris Vasks. She will also play selections from Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Diaphonic Suite and Michel Blavet’s gigue in rondeau form. Bassist Michel Taddei will provide solo accompaniment for a 1913 silent documentary about cloisonné ware composed by Veronika Krausas. The other scheduled solo performance will be of Elliot Carter’s “Steep Steps,” scored for bass clarinet and played by Jerome Simas. Finally, the duo performance will join violinist Anna Presler and pianist Leighton Fong in selections from the 24 duos composed by Jörg Widmann.

A special Web page has been created on the LCCE Web site for this concert. Shortly before the concert gets under way, this Web page will provide a hyperlink to the streaming source. If the concert is held at SFCM, provisions will be made to insure appropriate social distancing among those in the audience. Any information about this alternative will also be posed on the event Web page, probably during the last few days on this month.

“The other coast” Debuts on BIS Records

This month began with an account of the sixth album of the vocal quartet that calls itself New York Polyphony by BIS Records. The fact that BIS is based in Sweden should give some awareness of its global reach where the catalog artists it presents is concerned. I thus took a fair amount of interest when I learned that the previous month had seen the debut of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO) on the BIS label.

My wife and I had lived in Los Angeles during the final years when Iona Brown was the LACO Music Director, and she was replaced by Christof Perick not long before I made arrangements for our move to Singapore. Jeffrey Kahane succeeded Perick in 1997 and remained as Music Director until September of 2017. Jaime Martín appeared as guest conductor at the beginning of the new season and was appointed Music Director the following February.

Kahane is the conductor on LACO’s debut album with BIS. The album consists of four compositions for violin and chamber orchestra; and the violinist, Margaret Batjer, is also making her BIS debut. The recording sessions all took place in 2018 (March and September). The opening selection is the world premiere recording of a two-movement violin concerto by American composer Pierre Jalbert, which he composed in 2017. He wrote the concerto on a co-commission for the concertmasters of LACO, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. At that time Batjer had been LACO concertmaster since 1998.

The final selection on the recording, “Lonely Angel” by Pēteris Vasks, was also composed in this century (in 2006); but it was based on the final movement of a string quartet he had composed in 1999. The twentieth century is also represented by the version for violin, string orchestra, and percussion of “Fratres” by Arvo Pärt. The remaining selection on the album is Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1041 violin concerto in A minor.

This makes for impressive diversity. In the face of that diversity, there is no questioning the technical skills of either the concertmaster or the conductor. Nevertheless, my wife and I used to attend LACO concerts regularly because there was a freshness to their interpretations that we found we were less likely to encounter on our visits to listen to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. We had enjoyed Brown’s leadership and the beginning of Perick’s tenure; and, while there was much to relish in Singapore, I regretted missing the opportunities to experience more of his work.

However, while there is no questioning the high level of technique on this debut album, any sense of that freshness does not come across particularly convincingly. Batjer’s approach to the Jalbert concerto is definitely impressive; and she could not do better justice to the tempo marking for the second movement, “With great energy.” Nevertheless, the overall impact suggests that, for all of the attention to giving a precise account of all the technical details, neither the soloist nor the conductor had much to say about any rhetorical undercurrents for those details. The same can be said of the technique behind the Bach concerto.

Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks (photograph by Hokit, from Wikimedia Commons,  licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

At the end of the day, I would say that the Vasks selection provides the primary motivation for listening to this album. During my early years of writing about music, I encountered from both students and faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music considerable enthusiasm for Vasks and his music. I tried to seize any opportunity to listen to his chamber music in recitals there; and, when I made the move to extend my writing to records, an all-Vasks album was one of my earliest targets. Given the extent to which Pärt has become pretty much a “household name,” I still feel that Vasks deserves just as much attention; and I hope that this recording of “Lonely Angel” will give that attention a bit of a boost.

Mellon Music Festival Visits Old First Concerts

Last night at the Old First Presbyterian Church, Old First Concerts presented a recital by the Mellon International Chamber Players. Sadly, the program book said nothing about what that name signified. The name is taken from the Mellon Music Festival held in Davis, California. It has nothing to do with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation or the family behind that foundation, which has done so much to support performing arts activities. Instead, one must consult the Mission Web page on the Festival’s Web site. There one reads the following:

"Mellon Music Festival" is derived from Sindarin, a language from J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth Universe - popularized by the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. The word "mellon" directly translates to "friend." And it is the friendships we nurture while sharing and experiencing music that make this festival possible.

Stephanie Zyzak, Eunghee Cho, and Roger Xia (from the event page for this performance on the Old First Concerts Web site)

The Festival was founded and is currently directed by cellist Eunghee Cho. Last night he performed with violinist Stephanie Zyzak, a Festival veteran, and sixteen-year-old pianist Roger Xia, currently a junior at Davis Senior High School. However, the performance was at its best before Xia took the stage when Zyzak and Cho began the concert with a duo performance.

The opening selection was “Castillo Interior” by Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks. The title is well chosen, since there are qualities of “interiority” in many of Vasks’ compositions, a stillness one also associates with Arvo Pärt but with a rhetorical expressiveness uniquely its own. The music begins with what amounts to counterpoint in four voices requiring both violin and cello to play sustained double-stopped passages. This is where listeners are most likely to think of Pärt, since the rhetoric is one of the sort of quietude one encounters in “Fratres.” However, that stillness alternates with rapid-fire passages which, given Vasks’ interests in his early works, may well be aleatoric. The overall structure involves nothing more than this alternation between an almost static sense of order and an almost unbridled sense of chaos. Both Zyzak and Cho clearly caught the composer’s spirit in their execution, joining the ranks of the apparently sparse number of Americans serving as advocates for the virtues of Vasks’ music.

This opening selection was complemented by the second half of the program, which consisted entirely of Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 90 (“Dumky”) piano trio in E minor. As many listeners know, the Dumka is an Eastern European form involving the alternation of somber introspection and unbridled exuberance. Opus 90 is basically a succession of six movements, all in Dumka form.

The challenge in performing this trio is to make sure that the listener does not dismiss the whole affair as “one damned thing after another” (as Winston Churchill put it). Sadly, neither the group nor the individual players were able to invest the reading of Opus 90 with a convincing sense of the diversity through which each movement establishes is own individuality in a succession that almost suggests a narrative unity. In other words, there is more to this music than may meet most ears; but last night’s performance never quite captured where that “more” resides.

Opus 90 thus emerged as a disappointing follow-up to an even more disappointing offering prior to the intermission. Zyzak and Cho performed the solo parts from the first movement of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 102 double concerto in A minor with Xia providing accompaniment at the piano. Sadly, Xia limited his performance almost entirely to those passages for the two soloists, meaning that he lopped massive cuts out of the piano reduction of Brahms’ orchestral score. This amounted to an egregious approach to the overall structure, a practice that I had hoped had vanished since the days when Leopold Stokowski would cut performances to shreds to make them fit the timing of the animations produced for Walt Disney. Going back to the Mellon Mission, there is nothing nurturing about violating the intentions of a major composer in music history!

Mixed Results from Marwood and NCCO

Last night in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the New Century Chamber Orchestra gave the first San Francisco performance in its 2018–2019 season. British violinist Anthony Marwood was the principal soloist on the program in addition to leading the ensemble as Guest Concertmaster. The high point of the evening occupied the second half of the program, devoted entirely to “Tālā Gaisma” (distant light), a 30-minute single-movement concerto for violin and string orchestra by Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks. Written between 1996 and 1997, the concerto was given the Latvian Grand Music Award in 1997.

Pēteris Vasks (photograph by Hokit, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

Like many of his age (Vasks was born in 1946, the same year as yours truly), Vasks was drawn to many of the different approaches to “extreme abstraction” that flourished in the Fifties and Sixties, followed by the “minimalist backlash” of the Seventies and Eighties. Ultimately, Vasks departed from the prevailing trends, falling back on a tonal lyricism in which he was never afraid to insert provocative dissonances. “Tālā Gaisma” is one of several works for violin and strings; and Vasks’ approach to cadenza writing occasionally seems to reflect the technical challenges one finds in Jean Sibelius’ violin concerto alongside some of Sibelius’ more “naturalistic” approaches to rhetoric. Vasks’ aesthetic shift may or may not have emerged through composer’s growing interest in environmental issues, hence his decision to give his concerto a title reflecting (pun intended) a natural phenomenon.

For all of its uninterrupted extended duration, the concerto readily lends itself to the focus of the attentive listener. One can appreciate an underlying “movement structure” through which the composer explores a broad diversity of rhetorical stances. At the same time one easily marvels at the technical challenges, not only in the cadenza work but also in the “textural background” assigned to the soloist when the ensemble is unfolding the thematic material.

Marwood’s approach to the solo work was technically awe-inspiring and rhetorically focused. Indeed, his focus was so intense that there were times (many I am afraid) when it seemed as if he had lost touch with his “other job” of leading the ensemble. Fortunately, at those times Associate Concertmaster Dawn Harms admirably (and unobtrusively) took on the responsibility of guiding the ensemble in and out of the twists and turns unfolded by the soloist.

Marwood also performed as soloist in the opening work on the program, Sally Beamish’s “Seavaigers.” This time he shared solo duties with accordionist James Crabb. Like “Tālā Gaisma,” “Seavaigers” reflects a strong interest in the natural world, particularly that of the sea. It consists of three movements entitled, respectively, “Storm,” “Lament,” and “Haven,” suggesting a relationship between mere mortals and natural forces they cannot control.

Sadly, Beamish’s rhetorical skills were not quite up to the implications of her overall plan. I cannot recall when I have heard a jollier approach to the musical depiction of a storm; and I could not, for the life of me, fathom why the prevailing mood was so upbeat. Indeed, over the course of the entire composition, there was a sense that both thematic and rhetorical scope were unduly impoverished. Thus, the “main attraction” of the performance came down to the give-and-take between Marwood’s violin and Crabb’s accordion. Both of them were decidedly up to the task, and there is a good chance that some improvisation was involved. However, the overall experience was that the music was a box of raisin bran with too few raisins in it.

Nevertheless, there was a sense that last night’s performance was trying to do justice to the score. Sadly, the same could not be said of the following selection, which concluded the first half of the program, Antonín Dvořák's Opus 22 serenade in E major for strings. This is music in which the composer’s sensitivity to texture is as finely honed as his capacity to invent imaginative thematic material reinforced through expressive harmonic progressions. Too much of the execution (led by Marwood in the Concertmaster’s chair) was unduly muddled, undermining all the qualities that can make this score a source for delightfully absorbing listening. Perhaps so much time when into preparing the ensemble for its role in supporting Marwood’s solo work that little time was left to get them up to snuff as an ensemble unto itself.

AdAstra Piano Trio Makes a Nonstandard Recording Debut

A little over a week ago the Polish label CD ACCORD released the recording debut of the AdAstra Piano Trio. Also based in Poland, the group consists of violinist Anna Szabelka, cellist Łukasz Frant, and pianist Joanna Galon-Frant. The title of the album is Episodi, which is taken from the first selection, “Episodi e Canto perpetuo” (episodes and perpetual song) by the Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks. In fact the entire album is devoted to American and Eastern European compositions written during the last century.

At the very least this is a refreshing change from piano trios that feel determined to establish their chops through familiar nineteenth-century repertoire, daring to cross over into the next century only for the likes of Maurice Ravel or possibly Dmitri Shostakovich. The American composers on the album are Henry Cowell (his 1965 “Trio in Nine Short Movements”) and Paul Schoenfield (his 1985 thoroughly loopy three-movement “Café Music”). The other Eastern European is the Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin, represented by a 1997 piece that Grove Music Online translates from the Russian as “3 Merry Pieces,” which is apparently based on much earlier pieces composed for solo piano.

Curiously, this is not the first piano trio album to draw its title from Vasks. In 2012 the Boulanger Trio also used it as an opening album selection, following it with the two Shostakovich piano trios, providing a rare opportunity to listen to the seldom recorded Opus 8 trio in C minor. Similarly, AdAstra has prepared a program of rarely heard pieces. However, here in San Francisco there is one notable exception: “Café Music” has received a generous amount of exposure, particularly by the Aleron Trio before they disbanded. It was written on a commission by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, supposedly inspired by Schoenfield’s days as a house pianist at Murphy’s steakhouse in Minneapolis. However, when I have written about this piece in the past, I have described it as “more suited to the Mos Eisley Cantina, possibly hosting a guest band of Muppets.”

Unfortunately, Schoenfield’s over-the-top sense of humor has not translated well to this recording. In fairness, however, it may be the case that it does not translate well to any recording. The very sight of three highly disciplined performers deftly jumping through all the hoops set up by Schoenfield’s score is as much a part of the fun as is the music itself. When it comes to comedy in music, the Shchedrin selection fares much better on recording, particularly the second of the three pieces, whose title in English translates into “Let’s Play and Opera by Rossini.” Structured as a coloratura aria with an introductory recitative, the piece indulges shamelessly in Rossini quotes and packs no end of low-comedy gags into a little more than two minutes. For this listener, at least, Shchedrin having fun with Rossini is a lot more satisfying than the fun he had with Georges Bizet when he prepared a score for a ballet about Carmen choreographed by his wife Maya Plisetskaya.

The more serious selections by Cowell and Vasks lead the listener into more exploratory domains. Both composers were interested in the technical potential of all three of the instruments in both solo and ensemble capacities. Furthermore, each of the two compositions amounts to a series of relatively brief studies. One might regard them both as sets of études; but these are “studies” directed at the ears of the attentive listener, as well as at the technical skills of the performers. From this point of view, the opportunity to revisit the Vasks composition turned out to be a very welcome one, while my reaction to the Cowell pieces simply involved wondering why I had to wait so long to listen to them for the first time.

How long will we have to wait before AdAstra makes their first tour of the United States?