Ensemble Ari Showcases Women Composers

Ensemble Ari is a group of Korean-American musicians based in the Bay Area organized by composer Jean Ahn. Last night she introduced three of those musicians to the “virtual audience” for the latest program to be presented by Old First Concerts. They presented a program consisting entirely of music by women composers. The entire program was framed by two compositions by Amy Beach, between which were presented a recent composition by local composer Addie Camsuzou and selections from a collection of preludes by Sofia Gubaidulina. All three of the performers were also women: violinist Jiwon Evelyn Kwark, cellist Sarah Hong, and pianist Sharon Lee Kim.

The program was organized to feature each of these women as a soloist, after which they all joined forces to play Beach’s Opus 150 piano trio. The trio was one of her last compositions, completed in 1938. In many ways it reflects the influences of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms. Nevertheless, it is the work of a mature composer that had established an impressive catalog across a multitude of genres; and her “chamber music voice” is decidedly her own. Indeed, from a personal point of view, this is one of the most familiar of her compositions; and I have previously written about two different recordings of it, the most recent having been almost exactly a year ago. While it is dangerous to draw upon recordings as a benchmark for concert performances, I feel that the Ari players never quite captured the compelling rhetoric of Opus 150, perhaps because each of the members had been putting so much time into her solo offering.

Certainly, Kwark seemed more comfortable with Beach’s more sentimental Opus 23, a “romance” for violin and piano. This was a far more intimate composition, and Kwark effectively summoned the appropriate affective spirits behind the thematic material. Kim served as a dutiful accompanist, following Kwark’s lead on the rhetorical progress of the composition and the more youthful spirit behind that rhetoric.

This was followed by a brief selection of Camsuzou’s music. Her instrument is the violin, but in 2018 she composed the first in a series of études for solo piano. In introducing this piece, Kim called out Camsuzou’s keen understanding of the diversity of piano sonorities; and it was impressive to experience how many of them she brought into play over the course of the few minutes allotted to her étude.

Hong, on the other hand, went on a bit too much in her introduction to five of the preludes from the set of ten that Gubaidulina composed for solo cello in 1974. These were an ideal complement to Camsuzou’s étude, since each prelude was conceived to highlight a particular approach to performing technique. Hong’s account was dutiful, but I suspect that there was more wit behind each of Gubaidulina’s preludes than she managed to express.

As a result, the entire program conveyed a sense of impressive technical achievement; but the performers did not always home in on bringing to light those affective spirits behind the prodigious technique.