SFS Chamber Music: BWV 988 as String Trio

Yesterday afternoon in Davies Symphony Hall, the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) presented their first chamber music recital of the season. The most recent work on the program, with the intriguing title “Till Eulenspiegel einmal anders!” (Till Eulenspiegel, one more time!), had to be dropped (without explanation). However, there was more to enjoy in the early twentieth century of Maurice Ravel and the eighteenth-century “bookends” of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at the beginning and Johann Sebastian Bach concluding.

For me the high point came at the conclusion of the program with a performance of Bach’s BWV 988 set of keyboard variations usually known as the “Goldberg” variations. This was performed by the trio of violinist Melissa Kleinbart, violist Katarzyna Bryla (Joanne E. Harrington & Larry I. Lokey Second Century Chair at SFS), and cellist Amos Yang in an arrangement by Dmitry Sitkovetsky. I shall always remember when András Schiff included this in a series of recitals he brought to Davies in 2018, when he emphasized in his notes for the program book, “Always follow the bass line.” In that context, it stuck me that the “leadership” of this performance resided in Yang’s cello performance, rather than Kleinbart’s “melodic” offerings. Nevertheless, this realization of elaborate keyboard polyphony was decidedly an act of equal priorities for all three of the players. What mattered most was the diversity of “thematic voices” among those players, all guided by that “fundamental” bass line.

Photograph by Fred Ernst of Lavinia Meijer playing a harp on which colored strings identify the C and G pitches (from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license)

The most diverse sonorities came from the Ravel selection, his “Introduction and Allegro” composed in 1905. This featured a harp (Katherine Siochi) performing with two winds (Blair Francis Paponiu on flute and clarinetist Matthew Griffith) and a string quartet of violinists Jessie Fellows and Olivia Chen, Leonid Plashinov-Johnson on viola, and cellist Anne Richardson. I have long been familiar with this music through recordings; and I still remember my “close-up” encounter with the instrument when Meredith Clark played it with One Found Sound. However, even at the greater distance afforded by Davies, I could still appreciate the delicate polyphony woven by this diverse collection of instrumental sonorities.

The program began with a delightfully whimsical undertaking. The music was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 265 set of variations on “Ah vous dirai-je, Maman” (a theme better known in this country as both the “Alphabet Song” and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”). Mozart composed this as a piano solo. However, violist Bryla arranged the music as a duo, which she performed with SFS Principal Viola Jonathan Vinocour. The two of them found just the right rhetorical stance to bring freshness to an all-too-familiar tune.

If yesterday’s program had to be abridged, it still emerged as a thoroughly engaging afternoon.