Levit Joins Final SFS Chamber Music Recital

Amos Yang, Igor Levit, Jonathan Vinocour, Dan Carlson, and Melissa Kleinbart acknowledging audience applause after their performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 57 piano quintet (photograph by Michael Strickland)

Yesterday afternoon in Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Artist-in-Residence Igor Levit continued his visit by joining SFS musicians in the final Chamber Music Series concert of the 2022–23 season. He took the piano part in the final selection, which accounted for the entire second half of the program. That selection was Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 57 piano quintet in G minor, which he performed with violinists Melissa Kleinbart and Dan Carlson, violist Jonathan Vinocour, and cellist Amos Yang. Shostakovich composed this quintet in 1940, having come back into Joseph Stalin’s good graces with his Opus 47 (fifth) symphony in D minor in 1937. The quintet was subsequently awarded the Stalin Prize.

There is at least a bit of a sense of “new wine in old bottles” in Opus 57. The first two movements constitute a prelude-fugue coupling, and the fugue is nothing short of jaw-dropping. (Shostakovich would later, in the early Fifties, go on to compose a full cycle of piano preludes and fugues for his Opus 87.) These movements are followed by a Scherzo, which is probably as close as any composition could get to the screwball comedy films from the Thirties and Forties. Sobriety returns in the Lento intermezzo movement with the most poignant rhetoric in the entire composition, and the quintet wraps up with a wistful Allegretto that almost seems to fade off into the distance.

All four of the string players were familiar faces, not just from SFS concerts but also in their frequent participation in the Chamber Music programs. Clearly, all of them were experienced quartet players; and Levit fit comfortably into their company. I have been fortunate enough to encounter Opus 57 several times in the past. Yesterday afternoon provided a delightfully refreshing exercise in memory-prompting, recognizing all the familiar thematic material while enjoying the many dimensions of expressiveness in the performance itself.

On the other hand, none of the selections performed prior to the intermission were familiar to me. The program began with Frank Bridge’s “Lament,” composed in 1912 for two violas. For this performance Vinocour was jointed by Leonid Plashinov-Johnson. Bridge knew exactly how to treat both parts as equals, and it was easy for the attentive lister to get wrapped up within the interplay of the two voices.

The most recent works on the program were two compositions by Mark O’Connor, “Appalachia Waltz” (1995) and “Emily’s Reel” (1999). They were performed by the trio of violinist Jessie Fellows, violist Katie Kadarauch, and Daniel G. Smith on bass. I had expected that O’Connor would have scored his music for plucked bass, but everything Smith played was bowed. “Emily’s Reel” was the more engaging of the two offerings, primarily by virtue of the rich interplay among the three instrumentalists. Nevertheless, the listening experience felt a bit like a “light warm-up” before the intensity of Shostakovich’s wild ride.