Last night in the Barbro Osher Recital Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), the new season of Chamber Music Tuesday got off to a robust start with two major compositions for piano and strings by two of the “three B’s,” Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms. As is usually the case, the students performed with a visiting guest artist, pianist Shai Wosner. The program also began with an “overture” of sorts, the “No-Man’s-Land Lullaby” by Eleanor Alberga, performed by Jeeihn Kim on violin and pianist Jon Lee.
I have to confess to a preference for the “dark side” of music; and, in that context, I have been fortunate enough to encounter Alberga’s composition in several recital performances. The most recent of these was this past June, when Stella Chen included it in the Shenson Spotlight Series program she prepared and performed in Davies Symphony Hall. Both Kim and Lee clearly knew how to deliver all the shades of darkness in Alberga’s rhetoric without ever allowing the delivery to devolve into maudlin gestures. This was a performance that seized the attention, preparing the listener for the more traditional offerings that would follow.
Jeeihn Kim, Dabin Baek, and Shai Wosner performing Beethoven’s Opus 70, Number 2 piano trio in E-flat major (screen shot from the video of last night’s performance)
Kim then joined Wosner for the second of the two Opus 70 Beethoven piano trios, performing with cellist Dabin Baek. This is “upbeat” Beethoven at its finest, the perfect reminder that Beethoven did not scowl all the time. The musicians had no trouble capturing the high spirits of the score, and each movement engaged the attentive listener from opening to closing gesture. There were even a few hints in the second movement that Beethoven may have been making fun of his own discomforts with “high society.”
Just as engaging, but far darker in rhetoric, was the Brahms selection, the Opus 60 piano quartet in C minor, which supposedly was influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. For this performance Wosner was joined by violinist Shintaro Taneda, Isabel Tannenbaum on viola, and cellist Ayoun Alexandra Kim. The good news was that the ensemble never tried to overplay the darkness. They found just the right level of expressiveness that allowed the music to speak for itself, knowing full well that Brahms did not want to wallow in Werther’s misfortunes.
If last night was representative, then this promises to be a good season for chamber music!
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