All-Star Trio at Davies Barely Shines

Joshua Bell, Steven Isserlis, and Jeremy Denk (from the event page for last night’s concert on the SFS Web site)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) presented the final offering of its 107th season in its Great Performers Series. This was a recital of three instrumentalists all worthy of the description in the Series title: violinist Joshua Bell, cellist Steven Isserlis, and pianist Jeremy Denk. All have performed as soloist with SFS, but it is through solo work that all of them have risen to the heights of their respective reputations.

Having them all on stage at the same time suggests a variation on one of the oldest jokes in the book: A violinist, a cellist, and a pianist walk into a bar. The bartender looks them over and finally says, “As long as you are all here, why don’t you play some trios?”

That’s what they did last night, serving up a repertoire that took in slightly more than a century’s worth of music. This provided the attentive listener with the opportunity to experience their work in a variety of different rhetorical lights. As might be guessed, however, some lights shone brighter than others.

The group opened with the oldest work on the program, Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 49 trio in D minor, the first of that composer’s two piano trios, both composed relatively late in his short life. The performance captured the full breadth of rhetorical dispositions that spans the composition’s four movements. The execution was energetic and often sparkling. (Can any other composer make a minor key sound so cheerful?) Most importantly, Denk knew how to keep Mendelssohn’s pianistic excesses under control well enough to let both Bell and Isserlis have a generous say in the matters that unfolded. There could not have been a better way for the trio to introduce itself to the audience.

Equally impressive was the second work in the chronological ordering, which was programmed to introduce the second half of the evening. This was the first of the two compositions that Sergei Rachmaninoff called “Trio élégiaque,” written in January of 1892, the year in which he graduated from Moscow Conservatory. Unlike the three-movement structure of the second of these trios, last night’s offering was structured as a single movement.

Having listened to Isserlis discuss Rachmaninoff during a master class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), it was easy for me to imagine that he was the driving force behind this performance. If so, then there were no signs of any serious disagreements with his partners. As was the case with the Mendelssohn offering, there were clear preferences for piano virtuosity; but Denk again made sure that the attentive listener appreciated the balance of all three resources.

Both of these offerings suggested that this was a group of impressive individuals, each with his own distinctive opinions but also a clear appreciation of how to “play well with others.” Sadly, that appreciation was less evident in the two major works on the program. Continuing with the chronological order, the next trio was the one that closed out the second half: Maurice Ravel’s only piano trio, composed in the key of A minor in 1914. This is music that is as rich in its sonorities as it is in the sophisticated scope of its structure.

Unfortunately, those sonorities did not always register with the appreciation for detail that one expects from a Ravel performance. One of the strongest impressions comes from the spooky sounds of natural harmonics unfolding in the glissando played by the cello at the end of the first movement. (I remember once consulting with an SFCM student to confirm that I was supposed to be hearing natural harmonics!) Isserlis never quite caught the spirit of this passage, and his execution dulled the sharp changes in rhetoric across the first two movements. This seemed to be a symptom of an overall approach to execution focused more on the marks on paper than on the spirit that made those marks possible.

That detachment from spirit was even more evident in what should have been the most intense offering of the evening, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 67 (second) trio in E minor, completed in 1944. Here, again, Isserlis was required to plumb intense rhetorical depths in the very opening measures, again colored by upper harmonics. To his credit, his execution made for the softest passage of the evening; and, when Bell joined him, he did so with the best possible balance to Isserlis’ subtle dynamic levels.

However, the haunting qualities of that introduction never really sustained. The first three movements of the trio unfolded with a disciplined account that showed little sign of the personal strain on the composer brought about by World War II and the brutality dished out by the invading Germans. Shostakovich himself sustained the personal strain of the Siege of Leningrad; but, just as importantly, his career involved close working relations with any number of Jewish musicians, most of whom were massacred by the invading Germans.

So it is that he introduced an explicit rhetoric of Yiddishkeit into the final movement of his trio. (Think of Fiddler on the Roof sinking into the deepest and darkest imaginable depression.) The thematic development is as brutal as it is ironic, making for one of the most intense single movements in the entire chamber music repertoire. It is hard to imagine this movement being played objectively, but last night’s performers tended to ease their way around that brutality, often giving the impression that they felt a need to smooth over the rough edges.

Near the conclusion the “Yiddishkeit theme” returns with a somewhat exhausted rhetoric, concluding with a spine-tingling glissando sigh from the cello. (I once suggested to my wife that this was a stray cat on the streets of Leningrad. Without skipped a beat, she replied, “Oh, no, they had eaten all of the cats by then!”) Isserlis never captured that spine-tingling quality, never getting beyond making sure that the glissando had a proper beginning and end. Ultimately, the trio concluded in the same darkness with which it began; but the execution gave the sense that the players never quite grasped the intensity of that darkness.