Chamber Music Tuesday Begins New Season

Last night in the Barbro Osher Recital Hall, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) presented the first installment of Chamber Music Tuesday for the new academic year. As is often (always?) the case, the program included a guest artist, pianist Inon Barnatan. His performance was part of a week-long residence, which also included presiding over a master class for piano students.

Violinist Shintaro Taneda, pianist Inon Barnatan, and cellist Ayoun Alexandra Kim at the beginning of last night’s first Chamber Music Tuesday program of the season (screen shot from the live video stream)

Barnatan joined SFCM students in the opening and concluding selections on the program. The first was the first of Ludwig van Beethoven’s three Opus 1 piano trios, for which Barnatan was joined by Shintaro Taneda on violin and Ayoun Alexandra Kim on cello. The second half of the program was devoted entirely to Amy Beach’s Opus 67 piano quintet. The string quartet for this performance consisted of violinists Daniel Dastoor and Yip Wai Chow, violist Isabel Tannenbaum, and cellist Constantine Janello. Following the trio, Barnatan performed three solo selections: Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 14 Rondo capriccioso in E major, Philip Glass’ seventeenth étude, and the fourth piece in the six Moments musicaux, Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 16.

The Beethoven trio was the most satisfying event on the program. Most important was the recognition by the players that, early in his career, Beethoven could have an engaging sense of humor, which could often turn positively raucous. That trait surfaces in all four movements of the trio, and Barnatan was not shy in engaging his body language to capture every one of the composer’s humorous gestures. Fortunately, his enthusiasm was contagious, encouraging both of the SFCM students to make it clear that they were having fun with their performance.

The Beach quintet was far more serious (F-sharp minor). My first encounter with this composition took place in my early days of covering performances at SFCM; and I have always been impressed with the expressiveness of score, whose intensity tended to suggest an interest in Gustav Mahler. Sadly, that intensity was lacking last night. It was as if the many dark clouds that Beach had conceived were lost in a thick fog. Beach was living in Alamo Square when this quintet was first performed in San Francisco, but last night did little to reflect on either her past “local presence” or the many imaginative turns in her quintet.

Barnatan’s solo work provided a useful scope of his repertoire interests. For the most part, his emphasis was on dexterity. Nevertheless, he made it clear that dexterity could present itself in a wide variety of different colors, and the juxtaposition of three decidedly different periods in music history provided just the right scope to present all of that variety. Nevertheless, over the course of the entire program, it was definitely Beethoven that stole the show.