New SFS Chamber Music Series Begins at Davies

Yesterday afternoon the Chamber Music Series, performed almost entirely by members of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), presented the first program of the new season. Three composers were represented on the program, appearing in reverse chronological order. The first selection was also the least familiar, composed by Erwin Schulhoff and given the title “Concertino for Flute, Viola, and Double Bass.”

The music was composed in 1925, an encouraging time for a new generation of composers to venture into new territory. Schulhoff reveled in the diversity of that territory, which included Igor Stravinsky’s venture into Neo-classicism, Arnold Schoenberg’s journey from expressionism into atonality, and the enigmatic pursuits of Erik Satie. Schulhoff’s concertino was more interested in contrasting sonorities than in atonality. Those sonorities extended into the upper register when the flute doubled on piccolo. The second movement of the concertino, given the title “Furiant,” allows the piccolo player to evoke the free spirit of a canary escaped from its cage. Schulhoff was somewhat of an outlier in the program that continued with Maurice Ravel and Ludwig van Beethoven; but, given that the Nazis sent him to the Wülzburg prison camp, where he died in 1942, the imaginative scope of his composing deserves more attention that it tends to receive.  Flutist Yubeen Kim, Leonid Plashinov-Johnson on viola, and Bowen Ha on bass did well in choosing Schulhoff  to begin yesterday’s program.

The Schulhoff concertino was followed by the far more familiar piano trio composed by Maurice Ravel a little over a decade earlier in 1914. With the rise of the recording industry, this became a popular piece of chamber music, particular after RCA released its recording the of “powerhouse trio” of violinist Jascha Heifetz, cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, and pianist Arthur Rubinstein! I suspect that the recording remains a “tough act to follow;” but performance always has an edge over any album! SFS musicians David Chernyavsky (violin) and Amos Yang (cello) performed with pianist Asya Gulua; and they had no trouble capturing the engaging diversity of dispositions encountered in Ravel’s score. Their attentiveness to that score and its connotations made for a listening experience far more engaging than any recording!

An engraving of Ludwig van Beethoven at the age of 26 (1796), executed for the publisher Artaria by Johann Josef Neidl (from Wikimedia Commons)

The second half of the program was devoted entirely to an early (1800) composition by Ludwig van Beethoven, his Opus 20 septet in E-flat major. This was performed by the coupling of three winds (Matthew Griffith on clarinet, Jessica Valeri on horn, and Joshua Elmore on bassoon) with four different string instruments: violin (Wyatt Underhill), viola (Katarzyna Bryla), cello (Anne Richardson), and bass (Daniel G. Smith). The six movements exceed the usual four-movement structure with the addition of a movement of variations and both Menuetto and Scherzo movements. Most interesting was a bass passage plucked by Smith, leaving me wondering if these were the “first steps” of the “walking bass!”

As usually seems to be the case, this was a program in which the familiar rubbed shoulders with the seldom-encountered; and the technical skills of all the contributing musicians made the afternoon my latest thoroughly satisfying journey of discovery.