Last night in Herbst Theatre San Francisco Performances (SFP) launched its 43rd season with a somewhat deceptive offering. The season began with the first concert in the 2022–23 Shenson Piano Series, featuring San Francisco pianist Garrick Ohlsson. However, Ohlsson played only one selection, which filled the entirety of the program following the intermission. On the other hand, all three selections on the program involved performances by the Apollon Musagète Quartet, whose members are all Polish: violinists Paweł Zalejski and Bartosz Zachłod, violist Piotr Szumieł, and cellist Piotr Skweres.
Mind you, the music that Ohlsson did play was a formidable selection, Dmitri Shostakovich’s only piano quintet, his Opus 57 in G minor. This was composed in 1940, a time when Shostakovich was doing his best to get back into the good graces of Soviet authority. The result was a composition of intense expressiveness and a paucity of sharp edges that might provoke the powers that be.
The composition is in five movements; and some (such as myself) might take it to be a reflection on Gustav Mahler’s approaches to his five-movement symphonies. The movements are structured with an ironically playful Scherzo in the middle, preceded by a prelude-fugue pairing and followed by an intermezzo that serves to introduce the finale. Over the course of those five movements, the quartet has extended passages on its own, suggesting that Shostakovich might have been thinking of a concerto for piano and very small orchestra. Indeed, the episodes of give-and-take outnumber those in which the quintet is performing as a whole to a generous degree. Ohlsson clearly did not mind this approach to “sharing the spotlight.” If anything, he seemed to be taking great pleasure in exploring a composition he may not have previously encountered.
From the audience “point of view,” this was a thoroughly engaging experience. (To be fair, however, I should observe that I have been fortunate enough to listen to this music in performance several times; and I have multiple recordings, one of which has Shostakovich at the piano.) The ensemble seems to have appreciated that, in the wake of past hardships, Shostakovich was trying to recover his sense of humor. Thus the almost scholarly discipline of the second-movement fugue turns on a dime into a scherzo that suggests that the players may have indulged in too much vodka. Indeed, the broad palette of dispositions made this selection a perfect welcoming gesture for the new SFP season.
The intermission was preceded by Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 51 string quartet in E-flat major. This is one of many compositions through which the composer explored his nationalist roots. Those familiar with his music will quickly observe that, like many of his other works, the structure of this quartet pivots around its second-movement dumka, characterized by its abrupt mood shifts. (Aside: While most listeners are probably aware of the generous appearance of the dumka in Dvořák’s compositions, it it important, if not ironic, to observe that the word itself is Ukrainian in origin!) Apollon Musagète presented a clear and expressive account of the full scope of nuances in this quartet’s structure.
The opening of the program was far less conventional. The quartet played three of the four-voice fugues in Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1080 The Art of Fugue. In all likelihood, Bach wrote his collection of fugues and canons with pedagogy, rather than performance, in mind. Thus, there is no indication of instrumentation; and each “voice” in the counterpoint is written on its own individual staff. Nevertheless, the Wikipedia page for this work accounts for a wide variety of approaches to instrumentation, not to mention the imaginative visualizations created by Stephen Malinowski.
The three selections that Apollon Musagète performed were “Contrapunctus 1” (the “basic fugue” that Bach used as his point of departure), “Contrapunctus 4” (which explores the intervallic inversion of the fugue theme), and “Contrapunctus 9” (a double fugue, consisting of two subjects, with invertible counterpoint at the twelfth). Each was executed in such a way as to bring clarity to the interplay of the contrapuntal voices as realized by the individual instruments. The players were more interested in calling attention to the intricacy of Bach’s details, rather than serving up any sort of “personally subjective” account of the music. Having listened to any number of instrumental accounts of Bach’s manuscript, I have to say that Apollon Musagète provided the “sweet spot” for appreciating what Bach was trying to teach to his pupils.
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