As he demonstrated at the Chamber Music Master Class Tuesday night at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Gilbert Kalish is a pianist of considerable skill with a broad perspective on contrasting elements of the repertoire. That perspective was presented more extensively at last night’s Chamber Music Masters recital in the Conservatory Concert Hall. Performing with five faculty members, one alumnus, and two students, Kalish prepared a program that offered some of the most inventive efforts of Charles Ives, Robert Schumann, and Arnold Schoenberg.
The program began with Ives’ second violin sonata with Kalish accompanying faculty violinist Ian Swensen. As we have seen from his own recitals, Swensen has broad interests of his own; and the Ives sonata was a perfect match for the two of them. It offers us Ives with his usual perspective on familiar music (at least of his own time) interpreted through the often raucous distortions of overly enthusiastic amateur performers. The second movement, “In the Barn,” is a hoedown to end all hoedowns, where all the dancers have two left feet and the fiddler never seems to remember all the notes of the tune. Far more interesting from a theoretical point of view, however, is the opening movement, “Autumn,” which is the name of a hymn with a somewhat curious history. It was apparently the music played by the band on the Titanic when the ship was sinking, which is why Gavin Bryars adopted it as the core theme of his “Sinking of the Titanic.” It was also the hymn sung by Julian Beck’s creepy preacher in Poltergeist 2. In the Ives canon this movement is probably the closest the composer comes to treating a hymn tune in chorale prelude form, and the processes through which he discloses the hymn provide a benchmark for appreciating his other methods for rendering familiar material. The resulting performance was particularly notable for the clarity with which the complexities of both the violin part and its accompaniment were presented, making for one of the most informed and accessible interpretations I have heard.
The Schumann offering was his Opus 47 piano quartet in E-flat major. For this performance Kalish was joined by faculty members Jodi Levitz (viola) and Jennifer Culp (cello) and student Joseph Maile on violin. Schumann was another composer never known to shy away from complexity, and this is most evident in the structural intricacies of the quartet’s four movements. He also uses the coda of the third Andante cantabile movement to provide the first motivic suggestion of the fugue subject that drives the wild Vivace of the Finale. Here again clarity was the most salient factor in the performance, particularly as revealed in the unerring balance of the piano always avoiding the risk of overwhelming the three string voices, each of which contributed its own unique sonorities to the mix.
The virtues of clarity and balance, however, were most evident in the concluding work on the program, Anton Webern’s arrangement of Schoenberg’s Opus 9, his first chamber symphony. This work was originally scored for fifteen instruments; but Webern scaled the instrumentation down to two winds (flute and clarinet), two strings (violin and cello), and piano. This was a major undertaking, particularly considering that ten of those instruments were winds, all different except for the two horns. On the other hand Schoenberg’s rich instrumentation can pose the risk of distracting from the underlying logic, which takes that noun “symphony” more seriously than one might suppose; so there is a significant extent to which Webern’s arrangement clarifies the overall structure more effectively than Schoenberg’s original conception did.
From this point of view, Webern’s “mission” was admirably accomplished by the ensemble that joined Kalish. In this case the faculty members that participated were the two strings, violinist Axel Strauss and cellist Jean-Michel Fonteneau. The flautist was alumnus Justin Lee, and the clarinet part was performed by Master’s student Anna-Christina Phillips, who is already building up a diverse resume of activities outside the Conservatory. (She also performed the clarinet part in Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time at Tuesday night’s Master Class.) One may have missed some of Schoenberg’s more flamboyant sonorities, but Webern’s perspective of the language of the music itself provided more than adequate compensation.
Comments