SFS Chamber Music: Legion of Honor

Following up on the first chamber music recital of the season by San Francisco Symphony (SFS) musicians in Davies Symphony Hall last month, yesterday my wife and I had our first encounter with the other SFS chamber music series of performances at the Legion of Honor, the museum in Lincoln Park, which, in addition to its exhibits, houses the James A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Theater. The concerts at this venue are curated by SFS Concertmaster violinist Alexander Barantschik, who was joined yesterday afternoon by cellist Peter Wyrick (recently retired from SFS) and pianist Anton Nel. The program was devoted entirely to the music of Ludwig van Beethoven with two duo sonatas in the first half and the second of the two Opus 70 piano trios, composed in the key of E-flat major, filling the second half.

One of the manuscript pages from Beethoven’s Opus 70, No. 2, representative of his penmanship and frustration (from the IMSLP Web page of the entire manuscript, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License)

The full trio was, by far, the most engaging part of the program. Both of the sonatas had been composed before Beethoven reached the age of thirty. By the time he began work on his two Opus 70 trios, he had “hit his stride” (so to speak) with a solid command of technique, prodigious inventiveness, and (believe it or not) a sense of humor.

Indeed, while listening to the second (Allegretto) movement of the trio, I scribbled in my program book “Beethoven at his funniest.” In spite of the tempo, the movement begins with an almost dainty delicacy with brief short-long phrase couples that are playfully coy. These are then followed by a second section, which is foot-stomping at its heaviest. All three of the trio performers clearly appreciated the game that Beethoven was playing and knew exactly how to go along with it, following up on that rhetoric with the mood swings subsequently encountered in the Allegro Finale. The opening and scherzo movements were more sober in their composure, but the attentive listener had no trouble locating additional eccentricities from the composer.

Sadly, the first half of the program was less satisfying. In the violin sonata, Barantschik seemed to be having more trouble with intonation than one would have anticipated. However, this may have been due to too much heavy-handed banging at the keyboard on Nel’s part. As a result, none of the sonata’s three movements came across as convincing; and the entire work seemed to go on forever. Fortunately, things improved with much better intonation from Wyrick’s cello. For a two-movement sonata, this was a work of extended duration; but the chemistry between cello and piano made for a far more tolerable listening experience.

My past encounters with Gunn have been with Pocket Opera. The seating in Gunn is not particularly amenable to opera-length performances. It is not very well raked; and leg-room can be a problem for anyone with a height of six feet or more. Nevertheless, the “visuals” of opera production tend to compensate for such inconveniences. Chamber music faces a higher bar of challenge. Nevertheless, when a performance is seriously compelling, as was yesterday’s Opus 70 venture, one need not be distracted by the overall setting!