courtesy of Naxos of America
This past Friday the British Chandos label released an album of performances by the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective entitled American Quintets. The ensemble consists of the string quartet of violinists Elena Urioste and Melissa White, violist Rosalind Ventris, and cellist Laura van der Heijden, joined by pianist Tom Poster and bass vocalist Matthew Rose. The “program” consists of three quintets (all by American composers, as indicated by the album title) composed during the first half of the twentieth century.
The “central” offering is likely to be the most familiar. Samuel Barber’s Opus 3 is a setting of Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach,” scored for “medium voice” and string quartet. I am not quite sure what Barber intended by “medium.” I have a 1935 recording of him singing this composition with the Curtis String Quartet, and Barber is listed as a baritone. I may be too used to listening to Barber’s voice, but I found Rose’s tone to be at least a bit too dark and heavy for Arnold’s rhetoric. That said, I suspect that British listeners may be more sympathetic to setting the words of Arnold than many Americans might be.
Barber’s quintet is framed on either side by a piano quintet. The opening selection is Amy Beach’s Opus 67 in F-sharp minor, composed in 1905. The final selection was probably composed about three decades later, a quintet in A minor by Florence Price, for which this album is the world-premiere recording. These are decidedly contrasting offerings. As a pianist Beach had performed Johannes Brahms’ Opus 34 quintet in F minor in 1900, and many listeners are likely to detect signs of Brahms’ influence on her Opus 67.
I should point out that my personal history with this quintet dates all the way back to my first encounter with it at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in October of 2008. Also, “for the record,” I already have the Hyperion Records album of this quartet played by pianist Garrick Ohlsson with the Takás Quartet when its members were violinists Edward Dusinberre and Harumi Rhodes, violist Geraldine Walther, and cellist András Fejér. Regardless of what may be said or written about Brahms’ influence, I am probably most struck by the extent to which all four of the quartet instruments have distinctive voices of their own, thus avoiding the epithet of “concerto for piano and very small orchestra,” which one often encounters in chamber music that Brahms’ composed for piano.
The Price quintet, on the other hand, serves up American influences that one does not encounter in Beach’s score. It also is far less balanced in the durations assigned to the successive movements, which get progressively shorter. The first movement accounts for a little less that half of the entire duration, traversing a series of episodes, each with a different tempo. One might almost approach this movement as a chamber music approach to a dramatic monologue. The following Andante con moto movement, which is about half the duration of its predecessor, has a more recognizable ternary form. However, chamber music conventions are then dismissed in the third movement (again about half as long as its predecessor), which is entitled “Juba,” named for the African American dance style. This is where the music livens up and starts to feel more “American;” and the quartet concludes with an even shorter movement labeled as a Scherzo.
This music was never published during Price’s lifetime. (She died on June 3, 1953.) Indeed, the manuscript was not discovered until 2009 (which explains why this is a world-premiere recording); and, unless I am mistaken, it is never mentioned (or indexed) in Rae Linda Brown’s biography of Price, The Heart of a Woman. I have no idea how this music has been received when Kaleidoscope performs it on their “home turf” in the United Kingdom; but I suspect that most American listeners will be drawn to the subtlety of Price’s citations of American sources, a sharp contrast to the more blatant quotations one encounters in the music of Charles Ives.
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