Stunning Saariaho at Old First Concerts

Jessica Chang, Laura Gaynon, and Allegra Chapman (from their Old First Concerts event page)

Last night the Old First Concerts series at Old First Presbyterian Church presented a recital by the Ensemble Illume trio. This is not the usual chamber music trio, since it brings violist Jessica Chang together with a pianist (Allegra Chapman) and a cellist (Laura Gaynon). As a result, two of the selections on the program involved arrangements of music composed for different collections of instruments. However, it was the composition written for these three specific instruments “Je sens un deuxième cœur” (I feel a second heart), composed by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho in 2003, that provided the high point of the evening.

After following a relatively familiar path in her music education, strongly oriented around many of the modernist practices that emerged in Europe following World War II, Saariaho decided to pursue research into the nature of sound itself by working in Paris at IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, or Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music in English). Working at the Centre George Pompidou, where IRCAM is based, also put her in touch with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, which subsequently commissioned her work for performance. However, while much of IRCAM activity was organized around both analog and digital synthesis, Saariaho applied her research into the nature of sonorities to imaginative approaches to instrumentation and alternative performance techniques.

“Je sens un deuxième cœur” amounts to a tone poem in five movements, each of which has a poetic phrase for a title. The music elaborates on those phrases more through its ventures into unique sonorities than with conventional thematic material subjected to development through harmony and/or polyphony. The text phrases do not unfold as narrative but, rather, disclose different aspects of what gradually emerges as an intimate sexual encounter. However, the texts suggest, rather than describe; and, similarly, the music progresses through sonority-based techniques that disclose a rhetoric of suggestion. The one “traditional” element in the score is rhythm; and a foundation of passionate rhythmic patterns lends accessibility to the deployment of sonorities that depart from the usual grammatical elements on musical discourse.

I have the good fortune to posses a recording of a performance of this composition by pianist Gloria Cheng and two of the members of the Calder Quartet, violist Jonathan Moerschel and cellist Eric Byers. However, my listening experiences have not been sufficient to establish familiarity; and, to be honest, where extended techniques for string performance are concerned, watching is often a valuable supplement to listening. As a result, last night provided an excellent opportunity to appreciate Saariaho’s craft in finding just the right sonorities to match the spirit of the words behind each of her tone poem’s sections. Since the entire composition is roughly fifteen minutes in duration, I suspect that I would have benefitted from listening to the entire piece a second time after the intermission break.

Instead, the second half of the program was devoted entirely to Johannes Brahms’ Opus 114 trio in A minor. This was originally composed for clarinet, cello, and piano; but Brahms himself subsequently provided a part for a viola to replace the clarinet (as he had done for his two clarinet sonatas). While, from a technical point of view, Ensemble Illume provided an expressive account of this latter version, I found it difficult to avoid reflecting on the clarinet sonorities, more impassioned simply because the instrument has a more assertive repertoire of timbral qualities.

To some extent this was also true of the opening selection. Chang and Gaynon played Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 423 duo in G major, originally composed for violin and viola. Sadly, this alternative performance tended to lack the impact of the original; and I am still trying to puzzle out why this should be the case. One factor may have been that the strings for viola and cello are tuned to the same pitches separated by an octave, while the pitches of the viola strings overlap some of those on the violin, meaning that, between the two instruments, there are both shared and distinct string pitches. It may be the case that the distinction between violin and viola sonorities has greater impact than that of how viola and cello strings differ, but this is pure speculation on my part.