Cellist Bonnie Hampton gave her Chamber Music Masters recital last night at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in the company of both members of the faculty and Conservatory students. The program she prepared took the form of a sandwich, with a meaty slab cut from the twentieth-century repertoire enclosed between two thick slices of nineteenth-century “bread.” The “meat” was Elliott Carter’s 1948 cello sonata, composed at a time when he was just beginning to depart from his initial neoclassical ventures and pursue his striking approach to metre and rhythm for which he is best known. The “bread” consisted of pairing Robert Schumann’s second piano trio in F major (Opus 80), composed in 1847, with Johannes Brahms’ second string sextet in G major (Opus 36), composed in 1865.
The Carter sonata is probably best approached as a transitional piece in Carter’s development. It follows the classical architecture of four movements, with a scherzo-like Vivace leggiero and an Adagio separating the outer movements. However, it does not follow the usual classical rhetoric of a “harmonic journey” through related tonal centers. Furthermore, while there is a well-defined repertoire of thematic material, there is also considerable attention given to the rhythmic presentations of the themes, not only in the themes themselves but also in how they are accompanied.
It is that attention to rhythm that makes this sonata a transitional piece. Carter is probably best known for his technique of metrical modulation, a concept significant enough to have been given its own Wikipedia entry. The basic idea is that, just as harmonic modulation is achieved by a pivot chord (which assumes one structural function to its predecessors and another to its successors), it should be possible to change time signature with a similar pivoting technique (demonstrated with a brief but illustrative example in the Wikipedia entry). This technique only began to mature in the Fifties; but in the notes Carter provided for a Nonesuch recording of this sonata, he noted that the idea first occurred to him while working on the sonata. While the rhythms of the cello sonata do not modulate in the strictest sense of the word, they certainly go through progressions, suggesting that Carter was exploring how one could “journey” through a series of rhythmic patterns as one would through a progression of chords.
In last night’s performance Hampton was accompanied by student pianist Jeffrey LaDeur. LaDeur is already building up a promising resume of professional performances, and much of his work at the Conservatory has cultivated an acute set of modernist chops. He was thus well-equipped to negotiate the rhythmic complexities required to accompany Hampton’s solo work, whose own repertoire of rhythms alternates between “harmonizing” with the accompaniment and defining its own direction as a separate “contrapuntal voice.” One might say that the sonata itself served as a pivot for Carter’s own thoughts about structural function when working with time. Since, from this point of view, it is a highly significant piece of the twentieth-century repertoire, one has to wonder why it is not performed more often.
If Carter’s music is approached in terms of how one thinks about the passage of time, then Schumann’s Opus 80 provided an excellent introduction to the 1948 cello sonata. It has a similar four-movement architecture but with more introspective inner movements. There is also a fair amount of canonic writing, concerned as much with the interplay of rhythmic patterns as the overlay of melodic similarity. There is also considerable agitation that emerges in the faster tempos, even when the thematic episodes are sharply delimited, as they are in the first movement.
Hampton’s colleagues for last night’s performance were both faculty members, violinist Ian Swensen and pianist Paul Hersh. As is often the case in Schumann’s chamber music, the piano part is a strong one. Hersh performed it with a confident clarity but was always good at keeping it balanced with the string players. Still, there was a sense that he was the driving force behind the execution, using his control of tempo and dynamics from the keyboard to shape the delivery of the ensemble as a whole.
The performance of the Brahms Opus 36 sextet after the intermission took an interesting approach to incorporating student talent. Each pair of instruments combined as “master” (Axel Strauss on violin, Jodi Levitz on viola, and Hampton on cello) with a student on the second part. One of the most appealing attributes of this composition is the way in which Brahms alternates between an instrumental pair harmonizing a common line and having each voice follow its own contrapuntal path. Franz Schubert took a similar approach in his D. 956 string quintet in C major. We know that Brahms began to take an interest in Schubert’s music around 1862, so the 1865 sextet could easily be a reflection of that interest. The performance itself was a loving one, rich with the sonorities of its extended instrumentation. All six voices were crystal clear throughout the execution, providing an excellent opportunity to experience how Brahms worked with this particular genre.
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