Edward Simon Brings Piano Trio to SFP Salon

Yesterday evening in the Education Studio of the Diane B. Wilsey Center for Opera, San Francisco Performances (SFP) presented the second of the four programs in its Salon Series curated by pianist Edward Simon. On this occasion he led a piano trio joined by Hrabba Atladottir on violin and Eric Gaenslen on cello. Most of the program was devoted to Astor Piazzolla’s suite Estaciones Porteñas (known in English as “the four seasons of Buenos Aires”) in an arrangement prepared by José Bragato.

While Piazzolla originally created these four pieces separately for his own quintet, in which he played bandoneon, the music subsequently acquired a life of its own. They were composed between 1965 and 1970; and the earliest (summer) was created as incidental music for the play Melenita de oro (hair of gold) by Alberto Rodríguez Muñoz. However, things changed in the Nineties when Leonid Desyatnikov arranged the four pieces for Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica, adding a fragment of Vivaldi here and there to play up the “four seasons” theme; and that arrangement became a local favorite when Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg added it to the repertoire of the New Century Chamber Orchestra (which recorded it). (Desyatnikov also prepared an arrangement of Piazzolla’s “tango-opera” María de Buenos Aires.)

Bragato, on the other hand, was a cellist who often performed with Piazzolla. Unlike Desyatnikov, he saw no need to throw in any hints of Vivaldi. The truth is that Piazzolla had already insinuated a casual reference the Baroque period, concluding the “winter” composition with an affectionate but melancholy chaconne. Thus, where “fidelity to text” is concerned, last night’s piano trio was decidedly more “authentic” than the version that Kremerata Baltica and New Century brought to popular attention.

Indeed, beyond any matters of authenticity, last night’s account was engaging and affectionate from beginning to end. Over the course of the four pieces in the set, each of the performers had at least one opportunity for a virtuosic solo turn; and, as might be guessed, there were clearly passages in which Bragato was favoring the cello. Most importantly, however, while this group was probably formed for last night’s occasion, all three members clearly knew how to perform as a trio, rather than as three musicians, each skilled in his/her own instrument.

In that context the group was just as expressive in giving an account of Simon’s own “Abiding Unity.” Simon had written this for a jazz trio that included bassist John Patitucci. Patitucci was the one to suggest that the bass part could probably be just as effective on the cello. So it was that the instrumentation migrated from jazz trio to classical piano trio, with particular attention to the cello work. Stylistically, the music contrasted distinctively against the Piazzolla style; but it was just as distinctive in its departure from the more “classical” piano trio rhetoric, with Gaenslen giving a compelling account of that uniqueness of style in his cello part. The result was a stimulating evening of balanced perspectives of what a piano trio could do when moving beyond traditional conventions.