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.)
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