Paul Schoenfield After “Café Music”

courtesy of Naxos of America

Back when I was first beginning to hone my skills in writing about the performance of music, I discovered that I often encountered piano trio recitals that included “Café Music,” composed in 1985 by Paul Schoenfield. Indeed, the trio was performed frequently by a local group, the Aleron Trio, which, sadly, has since disbanded. As I understand the composition’s background, it was written on a commission by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, supposedly inspired by Schoenfield’s days as a house pianist at Murphy’s steakhouse in Minneapolis. Since I knew nothing about that venue, I found that I liked to describe its wild Looney Tunes rhetoric as evoking a more familiar café setting, the Mos Eisley Cantina from Star Wars with music provided by a guest band of Muppets.

Recently Schoenfield composed what amounts to a successor to “Café Music.” “Last Silence” is also a trio but with different instrumentation, scored for flute, violin, and piano. A little over a month ago, Azica Records released an album entitled Last Silence that features this composition as its final selection. The performers are Martha Aarons (flute), Lev Polyakin (violin), and Frances Renzi (piano). The score was commissioned by Polyakin and Renzi. Like “Café Music,” the score amounts to a roller coaster ride visiting popular forms and tropes given amusingly warped interpretations. The album also includes four pieces for violin and piano that Schoenfield called Souvenirs, also involving playful distortions of familiar dance forms.

The album includes three other trios with the same instrumentation as “Last Silence.” One of them reaches back to the end of the nineteenth century, César Cui’s Opus 56, described as Cinq petite duos, suggesting that these five little pieces were conceived for two “soprano” instruments accompanied by piano. From the first half of the twentieth century, there is a pair of “interludes” composed by Jacques Ibert in 1946 for flute, violin, and harpsichord or harp. The remaining offering is a three-movement trio composed a little over ten years later by Nino Rota. Rota is probably best known for providing music for the films made by Federico Fellini between 1950 and 1979; and, on this side of the pond, he composed the music for the first two of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films.

All of the selections on this album are delightfully entertaining, even if Schoenfield is the only one of the four composers deliberately intending to pull the listener’s leg. This is definitely upbeat music. As readers know by now, I continue to prefer stimulation (particularly when seasoned by wit) to soothing rhetoric when it comes to enduring COVID-19 conditions. Last Silence offers the perfect example of what my preferences seek!