Last night the Western New Mexico University’s Virtual President’s Chamber Music Series live-streamed a recital by the Neave Trio of violinist Anna Williams, cellist Mikhail Veselov, and pianist Eri Nakamura. Many readers probably know by now that this group is currently Faculty Ensemble-in-Residence at the Longy School of Music of Bard College, which is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The performance took place in the school’s rehearsal room, whose wooden shelving and cabinetry were clearly very kind to the acoustics.
The capture itself involved a single camera and a single microphone placement. While the audio was satisfactory, video quality left much to be desired. Given the much better quality encountered from previous accounts of Neave from Cambridge, one has to wonder whether signal degradation took place on the other side of the continent.
Neave is a wonderful ensemble to watch. Their physical bearing almost always tends to enhance the interplay of the three instrumental parts in the compositions they perform. Still, what matters most is the sound of the performance; and, if image quality did not rise to previous standards, one could still appreciate most of the subtleties in the music the trio was playing.
For those that have been following Neave through both performances and recordings, this concert was distinguished by continuing their promotion of music by women composers. Many of us became aware of this interest when the trio released its Her Voice album at the beginning of October of 2019. This album presented piano trios by Louse Farrenc, Amy Beach, and Rebecca Clarke. Last night’s recital began with a performance of an early work by Cécile Chaminade, her Opus 11 trio in G minor. Completed in 1880, this was the first of her two piano trios, the other being Opus 34 in A minor, composed in 1886.
Chaminade’s Wikipedia page has much to say about the composer’s French influences. My own listening, however, left a distinct impression that Chaminade was no stranger to the piano trios of Robert Schumann and probably the early version of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 8 trio in B major. Her keen ear for the interplay of structure and expressiveness seemed to reflect a preference for Germanic influences over those of her French teachers and colleagues.
Following the Chaminade offering, Neave revisited the Clarke trio. Williams told the story of how Clarke had submitted this 1921 composition to a competition organized by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. The judges reviewing the submissions saw only the music, not the names of the competitors. As a result of their assessment, Clarke ended up in a “dead heat” with Ernest Bloch. At that point both names were disclosed, and the judges were surprised to learn that one of the competitors was a woman. Whether or not that influenced the decision to award Bloch may never be known; but Coolidge (who was Clarke’s neighbor in the Berkshires during the summers) let their ruling stand.
Listening to Clarke’s trio in the context of that anecdote, I found myself reflecting on the extent to which both Bloch and Clarke had similar rhetorical tools in their respective knapsacks. Both of them mastered a solid command of composing with broad strokes running the gamut between assertive and aggressive. By the same count, neither of them tended to overplay that particular hand. (They both seemed to appreciate Hamlet’s view on the danger of out-heroding Herod!)
As a result, I came away from this performance realizing that encounters with Bloch’s music tend to be as hard to come by as those of the Clarke repertoire. Ironically, Bloch composed only one work for piano trio, a set of three nocturnes written in 1924. Perhaps Neave should consider preparing a program that would allow these two “rivals” to rub shoulders!
Neave concluded its program with the fall and spring movements from Astor Piazzolla’s Estaciones Porteñas (liberally translated as “the four seasons of Buenos Aires”). All four of this collection’s movements were composed separately at different times. Piazzolla composed them for the instrumentation of his own tango ensemble. The arrangement for piano trio was made by José Bragato, who was not given credit for the “special effects” bowing techniques that Veselov demonstrated prior to the performance. Neave’s performance of all four of the movements can be found on their Celebrating Piazzolla album.
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