Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances (SFP) presented its Gift Concert for the 2023–24 season. The music was provided by a piano trio with pianist Juho Pohjonen performing with cellist Jonathan Swensen and Stephen Waarts on violin. This was Pohjonen’s third SFP appearance, his first having taken place in March of 2008. Of greater interest may be that his second appearance took place in the Gift Concert for the 2019–20 season, when he accompanied South Korean violinist Bomsori Kim (making her SFP debut). In that spirit last night saw debuts of both Swensen and Waarts, and the latter may have been encountered by some at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
The program was framed by two piano trios. The first of these was Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 8, the first of his two trios, so unfamiliar that a performing edition was not prepared until six years after the composer’s death. Equally unfamiliar (if not more so) was the concluding trio, which was composed by a very young César Franck. Perhaps under the influence of Ludwig van Beethoven, his Opus 1 was a set of three piano trios; and last night’s program presented the first of them, composed in the key of F-sharp minor.
If this was his “first serious endeavor,” Franck seems to have been determined to pack as much as he could into the composition’s three movements. Indeed, the first movement is a rondo of generous duration. Not only does the primary theme recur a prodigious number of times but also each “separating” passage has its own abundant rhetoric. That movement is practically a composition unto itself. (The Shostakovich trio consisted only of a single movement.) Nevertheless, Franck’s abundance spilled over into his second movement, a scherzo with two trios, and a finale with everything but the kitchen sink (including several retrospective episodes). This is one of those compositions that leaves the attentive listener in a state of exhaustion; but, if the listener was really attentive, (s)he probably also emerged with a warm sense of satisfaction.
Like the Franck trio, Shostakovich’s Opus 8 was composed in the key of C minor during his conservatory days. (Both of them were in their late teens.) This was another example of a young composer “flexing his muscles,” although Shostakovich’s flexing was not as extensive as Franck’s. More important is that, for Shostakovich, this was a time when Joseph Stalin was barely known, if he was known at all. Thus, the composer was at full liberty to exercise his sense of humor without a care for the horrors that would confront him only a few decades later. There is much to enjoy in that sense of humor, and Opus 8 can be approached as an “early stage of cultivation.” Having had any number of satisfying encounters with Opus 67 (the second trio, composed in the key of E minor), I find it more than a pity that there are so few opportunities to appreciate its contrast with Opus 8. (Even the Beaux Arts Trio, which seems to have had an agenda of performing and recording an exhaustive account of piano trios from every period of history, seems to have overlooked Opus 8; but, to be fair, they also overlooked all of Franck’s Opus 1!)
The two trios on the program framed two duos. Both of these were by Leoš Janáček, the first for cello and the second for violin. Swensen was featured in “Pohádka,” which translates literally as “tale” but seems to have been inspired by fairy tales. The composer revised his score twice; and last night offered the final version, which was first performed in 1923. There is no narrative to speak of behind the three movements, but the rhetoric of the score seems to be directed more at the nature of the teller than of the tale itself.
Waarts then performed the four-movement duo sonata. Like much of the composer’s music (including “Pohádka”), each movement unfolds an intense exchange of thematic fragments. This is a rhetorical device that gives the composer his own unique stamp. One encounters it in just about everything he wrote, going all the way to the episodes that unfold in his full-length operas. Indeed, he composed that sonata at the same time he was working on one of his earliest (and least-known) operas about a trip to the moon. Like Swensen, Waarts was skillfully attuned to the rhetorical aspect of Janáček’s sonata, giving it an account that was both compelling and engaging.
There was no encore last night; but, given the intensity of that Franck trio, one can appreciate that all three of the performers probably felt that enough was enough!
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