As the cellist Bruce Uchimura said, the world is a better place for having once had Antonin Dvořák in it.
Uchimura, a member of the Kalamazoo, Mich.-based Merling Trio, offered his tribute to the great Czech Romantic composer during the trio’s appearance Wednesday afternoon on the Classical Café series at the Duncan Theatre’s Stage West. On the second half of that program, the trio performed the Dumky Trio (No. 4 in E minor, Op. 90), one of Dvořák’s most interesting experiments in that it consists of six dumkas, a dumka being a kind of Slavic folksong in which the mood alternates between melancholy and exuberance.
The Merling, based at Western Michigan University, is a veteran ensemble, consisting of Uchimura, his pianist wife Susan Wiersma Uchimura, and violinist Renata Artman Knific, and their familiarity with each other and their playing styles was much in evidence during the concert. Violin and cello made frequent eye contact, and Wiersma Uchimura at the piano often leaned in toward her colleagues as she made her next entrance or sought to add her voice to the musical conversation.
It takes some doing to make all of the pieces contrast enough to avoid similarity of tone and style, and that’s mostly a question of subtle adjustment. This performance was effective in that regard, but some sharper differences would made it work even better; in the first dumka, for instance, the joyous section that breaks out after the opening would have benefited by being faster and lighter, so that the gentle Weltschmerz of the slower music would differ from it more persuasively.
As it was, the most affecting music came in slow, emotive moments such as the beginning of the second dumka, where Uchimura’s cello playing stood out, as it did throughout the concert. He is an excellent cellist, with a large, powerful, beautiful singing tone, and every phrase he played was shaped and molded for profile and sensitivity.
In other parts of the trio, especially in the fourth dumka, the Merling bypassed opportunities for shading. Early on, there is an unexpected chord change (to G-flat from E-flat) after a similar two-bar pattern within the key. When the terminal chords in those phrases are set up with some preparation, the smallest of pauses to “present” the chord, the effect is magical. Here, it blended together; the result was perfectly acceptable, just not as interesting as it could have been.
Overall, the players and the music made a strong impression on the good-sized audience in the Stage West black-box theater. It’s very beautiful music, and the Merling knows how to get the loveliest parts of beautiful music across.
The Dvořák was the closing work on the program, which opened with a first half based on the notion of the seasons, and autumn in particular. The opening work was nothing less than the Autumn movement from Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, by some reckonings the most popular piece of classical music in the world. These short, colorful violin concertos have been rearranged countless times from their original strings and continuo format, and the trio arrangement played by the Merling inevitably had a bare-bones feel to it.
Violinist Knific, a Warsaw-born musician, was in the spotlight for this piece, and played standing up. It’s clear that she knows every note of this concerto, and she performed it with grace and thorough-going accuracy, and without any notable bent toward showmanship or display. That added to the modest sound of the music, even though Vivaldi’s indelible tunes were still charmingly effective.
The Uchimuras gave their colleague understated, quiet accompaniment to let her shine, and it worked well in throwing Knific’s accomplished technique into high relief. A piano trio, though, is not really ideal for this music; it’s easier to accept Vivaldi’s restricted harmonic idiom with strings, but a piano tends to expose it, and so it comes off sounding somewhat impoverished.
The trio setting worked much better for the next piece, the so-called Four Seasons of Buenos Aires of the Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla. Like the Dumky Trio that would follow it, these are popular forms that have dressed up and gone uptown, and in Piazzolla’s case, they are melancholy tangos in which interest comes from the intensity of the music at it unfolds rather than any particularly memorable stretch of melody; these are pretty tunes, but they are short-winded and more like motifs.
The Merling played these pieces with gusto and flair. Cellist Uchimura’s rich sound is ideal for this music, and he made the most of it, particularly in the descending chromatics of the Otoño movement. Wiersma Uchimura did a fine job with her solo work in the Invierno movement, and Knific played with sharp precision, particularly in the Primavera tango.
That movement was a touch on the slow side, and needed some more speed to make those jumping figures in the main melody (the most memorable of the four) add more drive to the proceedings. In the Piazzolla, as in the Dvořák, the Merling was at its best when it was being contemplative. Its fiery moments were somewhat muted, and while that didn’t hurt the Dvořák much, it made the Piazzolla sound cautious, and this is essentially pop music that works better when its moods are exaggerated.
The Merling Trio appears this evening in concert with Atlanta Symphony violinist Jun-Ching Lin on the Distinguished Artists Series at Palm Beach Atlantic University. The concert starts at 7:30 p.m. at Persson Hall on the PBAU campus in West Palm Beach. Tickets: $20. Call 803-2970 or email ticketcentral@pba.edu.