By Donald Waxman
The planets must have been in alignment last Thursday evening when the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival players, with their accustomed professionalism and virtuosity, presented an uncommonly interesting program at Lynn University’s Wold Center for the Performing Arts auditorium, arguably one of South Florida’s most beautiful and comfortable new performing arts venues.
And did I mention that the ticket prices were only $20?
The first half of the program consisted of three 20th- and 21st-century compositions, the second half, of a Brahms piano trio, a reversal of the usual ratio of new music to 18th- and 19th-century music that one hears at a typical South Florida concert, where often not even a single contemporary work is played (and Piazzolla doesn’t count).
The evening opened with a one movement work for trumpet and piano by the young American composer James Stephenson, preformed by trumpet player Marc Reese and pianist Lisa Leonard, who are both permanent members of the Palm Beach Festival corps and on the faculty at the Lynn University Conservatory of Music. Stephenson was trained as a trumpeter and played the trumpet in the Naples Symphony. He left that organization several years ago to devote his full time to composing.
Only 45, he has composed a prodigious amount of music, including a dozen concertos, many for unconventional instruments or combinations of instruments. One such unusual work is a concerto for trumpet, piano and string orchestra that he wrote specifically for Leonard and Reese, and which they premiered in 2007 with the Lynn Philharmonia. Those of us who were at that concert were particularly interested to hear Stephenson’s newer work for trumpet and piano duo.
Stephenson composed the 7-minute piece, Remember Forward, in memory of an exceptional woman whose untimely death affected a wide circle of friends and family. In this in memoriam the composer tries to answer questions about life and death, despair and, ultimately, hope. The protagonist in this spiritual quest is a solo trumpet, which plays almost without interruption for the entirety of the work. It is a difficult role for the trumpet, one that needs great nuance, contrast of tone and timbre, not to mention great endurance, though none of these challenges seemed difficult for Reese, who turned in a commanding performance.
The piano had more than an accompanying role. From the opening bars of the piano part, where single descending notes coalesce into a nervous tremolo, one is aware that the piano is also going to have an active role in this work. Leonard kept her part somewhat muted, wisely so, letting it rise intensity only in the more dramatic outbursts of the piece. It was a very well-integrated and nuanced performance, though one expected as much from Reese and Leonard, who have performed together many times. Of course, they also have the advantage of being married to one another.
In comparison with Stephenson’s fairly traditional Trumpet and Piano Concerto of 2007, Remember Forward is considerably more complex and the harmonic language more varied and evocative. One wishes him continued success and productivity.
Clare Shore is a composer from North Carolina who has been living in South Florida for the past 20 years. Though she has been active in our community as a teacher at Palm Beach Atlantic University and as director of music at Calvary United Methodist Church in Lake Worth, her compositions have been somewhat of a well-kept secret; undeservedly so, as she is a doctoral graduate of the Juilliard School and a well-recognized American composer with an extensive catalogue of published works.
The composition of Shore that was heard at the Lynn concert, scored for solo bassoon and string quartet, is an unusual one. It depicts the interactions we have with one another in the main stages of our lives, from the random interactions of childhood to the turbulence of adolescence, the passions of young adulthood, the more subdued interactions of the middle age and finally, the lonely introspection of old age. In this theme of the five stages of life, one is tempted to compare Shore’s work with Liszt’s famous orchestral tone poem Les Preludes, but except for the theme there is absolutely no similarity between Liszt’s splashy, extroverted tone poem and Shore’s intimate and subtle chamber piece.
The performers of Cyle d Vie were violinists Mei Mei Luo and Dina Kostic, cellist Susan Bergeron and bassoon soloist Michael Ellert, all permanent members of the chamber players, and violist Rebecca Diderrich, a guest artist. Ellert is also on the faculty of the Lynn Conservatory. The composition is a complex one, written in a harmonic language that has been called 12-tone tonality; that is, with elements of serial (12-tone) techniques used within an elusive tonal framework. The bassoon is the protagonist of this 12-minute work, playing almost without pause an elaborate solo part that is constantly traversing the three-octave range of the instrument. Surrounding the bassoon part is a recurring instrumental texture with the cello playing a plucked bass, the first violin playing soft counter-themes in high register, and in the middle ranges the second violin and viola often playing held notes, windows through which the bassoon line passes.
In this difficult solo bassoon part, Ellert seemed perfectly at ease. He has great finger dexterity, and in the bottom octave and a half of his instrument, a range where many bassoonists often sound dry and reedy, he has the rich sound of a baritone.
A problem with both this composition and the Stephenson piece is that one wants more than one hearing to get to know the music better. Second performances of new contemporary works are infrequent, and with the classical record industry in almost total collapse, the availability of a commercial recording is remote.
A new dynamic, however, now exists by way of the Internet. Almost all professional composers now have a website where one can listen to many of their compositions, often in their entirety. The performances may not always be of commercial CD perfection, but they are generally very good; the audio is surprisingly good, and of course it is all free. Shore’s Cycle de Vie can be heard on her website, and if Stephenson’s Remember Forward is not yet in the extensive audio library of his website, it will probably be there soon.
The first half of the concert ended with a wind quartet by Jean Françaix, one of a group of neoclassical French composers, including Poulenc, Milhaud and Jacques Ibert, who defined French instrumental music between the two wars. Their music is lighthearted and sportive, even irreverent, and often deliberately thumbed its nose at late German romanticism. These French composers had a particular affinity for wind instruments and so have endeared themselves to wind players for their highly polished and idiomatically written chamber music. The Françaix quartet consists of four short movements in which one hears many diverse elements: French folksongs, street cries, even a bit of American jazz – or what the French thought was American jazz.
The performers of the Françaix quartet were the festival’s three founders, flutist Karen Dixon; clarinetist Michael Forte, and bassoonist Ellert. The oboist was Erika Yamada, a guest artist. Theirs was a suave and stylish performance, one that had an almost tossed-off feeling to it, which is the way this music should be played. It is not the kind of music that sticks to the ribs. It wasn’t meant to. Françaix once defined his credo as a composer when he said, “Avec mon musique je veux donner le plaisir.” (“In my music I wish to give pleasure.”) And that he does. It was an entertaining and effervescent way to end the first half of the program, some Veuve Clicquot before intermission.
If French champagne ended the first half of the program, German meat and potatoes (and dessert, too) took up the entire second half with a performance of Brahms’ monumental Piano Trio in C minor, Op. 101, the last of the composer’s three piano trios. Performing in the trio were Kostic, Bergeron and Leonard.
The great challenge in many of Brahms’ chamber works is that his musical ideas are often orchestral ones. How then do you convert these ideas of symphonic proportion into the intimate genre of chamber music without their losing their magisterial quality? The opening movement of the Op. 101 Trio, for example, with its wide-ranging minor-key motifs and its stern dotted rhythms reminds one of the opening movement of the Brahms Double Concerto. The performers handled this challenge of style and content in a highly successful and commanding way, a performance in which the difficult piano part was played with precision and intensity and the highly energetic string parts played with outstanding control.
The second movement of the Op. 101 Trio is the favorite one of this writer. It is a very original movement: part scherzo, part capriccio, part intermezzo, and its themes scurry in and out of the movement like wraiths. The performers took the movement a bit faster than it is often played, to good advantage (it is marked Presto). This was an interesting performance: quiet, fleet and precise – an uncommon mix.
The third movement is one of Brahms’ most sentimental, with parts of the music such as the rolled chord accompaniments in the piano part sounding almost like salon music. This may well be a minority opinion, but whether so or not, the movement was played lovingly by the trio with special mention of the very affecting playing of the violin and cello in those quiet sections where the two instruments are playing in unison and sounding like they are singing a tenor and alto duet.
The final movement has a surprise. It starts out somewhat in the stern manner of the opening movement but mellows as it goes into major mode. And then at a point where the movement doesn’t yet seem quite finished, the music, unexpectedly, races to the end. The players propelled this sudden dash to the double bar with great vigor, and at their final fortissimo chord the audience responded with an ovation.
Aaron Copland once remarked that musicians who play a great deal of contemporary music often play 18th- and 19th-century music better than their colleagues who are considered specialists in the classics. Hearing the Brahms Trio played with such authority and sense of style in a concert where earlier they had played three 20th- and 21st-century works so convincingly has to underscore the relevance of Copland’s remarks. I wish that more performers would follow his advice.
Donald Waxman is a composer and contributing writer for Palm Beach ArtsPaper.
The final concerts in the festival’s inaugural fall series are set for 7:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 14, at Lynn’s Wold Center, and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 15, at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Lake Worth. The program, which includes student performers from Lynn’s Conservatory of Music, will feature a trumpet concerto by Albinoni, Andre Jolivet’s Pastorales for flute, bassoon and harp, the Bernstein Clarinet Sonata and the Octet of Igor Stravinsky. Tickets are $20; call 561-237-9000 for Lynn concerts, 800-330-6874 for the St. Andrew’s concerts, or visit www.pbcmf.org.