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!
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