Ives Collective’s “Incremental” Programming

Ives Collective leaders Stephen Harrison and Susan Freier (from the Old First Concerts event page)

Yesterday afternoon saw the return of the Ives Collective to the Old First Presbyterian Church to offer the final performance in this month’s Old First Concerts programming. The Ives Collective is managed by cellist Stephen Harrison and Susan Freier, who plays both violin and viola. They are joined by guest artists to meet the instrumentation demands of their programming. Yesterday’s additional performers were violinist Roy Malan and pianist Gwendolyn Mok.

The “incremental” programming involved a one-by-one increase in the number of performers as the program unfolded. Freier and Harrison began the concert with a performance of a duo for violin and cello composed by Erwin Schulhoff in 1925. They were then joined by Mok for settings of five “Negro Melodies” by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. After an intermission, Malan joined the group to conclude the program with Johannes Brahms’ Opus 60 (third) piano quartet in C minor. This “sequence” of compositions was “unified” because all three of the composers had benefitted from encouragement from Antonín Dvořák.

I must confess that the Schulhoff selection was what drew me to this particular concert. About a decade ago, there was a revived interest in his music, due in no small part to Daniel Hope’s promotion of music by composers who perished in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Following up on a recital that Hope gave in San Francisco with Jeffrey Kahane, I began to accumulate (and write about) a moderately generous collection of recordings. However, that source began to run dry by the spring of 2019. Ironically, my last prior encounter with Schulhoff’s music took place on February 9, 2020, when the Apollon Musagète Quartet launched the 2020 season of Chamber Music San Francisco. Almost exactly a month later, lockdown conditions began to be imposed to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

Schulhoff’s Wikipedia page organizes his music into four periods. His earliest compositions reflected influences from composers such as Claude Debussy, Alexander Scriabin, and Richard Strauss. This was followed by the influence of Dadaism. Thirty years prior to John Cage composing 4’33”, Schulhoff wrote “In futurum,” whose score consisted entirely of rests. Beginning in 1923 his interests shifted to jazz and neoclassicism, and this was the period in which he composed his duo. His final period reflected his interest in Communist ideology, a factor that led to his imprisonment in the Nazi’s Wülzburg prison during World War II, where he died of tuberculosis.

The duo is a product of upbeat rhetoric without Dada prankishness. The music does not reflect Schulhoff’s interest in jazz, and the second of the four movements has distinct gypsy influences. The movements are relatively brief and were given thoroughly engaging accounts by Freier and Harrison. That similar rhetoric of engagement continued into the Coleridge-Taylor settings.

The weakest part of the program was the “all hands” performance of the Brahms piano quartet. There were serious problems of intonation, which only surfaced during the entire program after Malan joined the group. Opus 60 is the darkest of the Brahms’ three piano quartets, and it deserves a rhetorically intense account. However, because the four musicians never managed to come together as a unified quartet, there was little room for rhetoric to shape the performance. The result emerged as a discouraging slog through music that was intended to draw listeners to the edges of their respective seats.