The focus of last night’s San Francisco Performances recital by violinist Daniel Hope and pianist Jeffrey Kahane was on early twentieth-century modernism. It was represented at the beginning of each half of the program by composers from “opposite sides” of Europe. The first half began with the second sonata for violin and piano buy the Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff, while the second half began with a short composition of theme and variations from the early years of the French composer Olivier Messiaen. Each of these “modernist statements” was then followed by music representing the tradition that the composer sought to reject. Schulhoff’s sonata was complemented by Johannes Brahms’ Opus 78 violin sonata in G major (his first); and the Messiaen offering was paired with the A major sonata by César Franck. Ironically, both modernists were prisoners of the Third Reich: Schulhoff died in the Wülzburg concentration camp in the summer of 1942, while Messiaen was a prisoner of war in Stalag VIII-A in Görlitz.
Schulhoff composed his second violin sonata in 1927. In the program book Eric Bromberger lists his influences during that “roaring” decade as “Expressionism, Dadaism, Schoenberg and serialism, Bartók and folk music, Gershwin and American jazz, and Alois Haba’s experiments with quarter-tone composition.” While this is probably the case, the composition from that period that may have motivated this sonata could easily have been Sergei Prokofiev’s second symphony, which was premiered in Paris in June of 1925. Prokofiev called this symphony a work of “iron and steel;” and it positively roars with the unrelenting dissonant energy of a massive factory. Schulhoff harnessed that same almost frightening sense of driving energy to this chamber music setting, and one can barely imagine the intensity of concentration required to execute such an intimidating score. Needless to say, both Hope and Kahane mustered that energy without sacrificing a sense of the formal sonata structures that provided a foundation for this tumult. The result was a stimulating, perhaps even refreshing, reminder of just how forceful the modernists of that time were in rejecting past traditions.
Arnold Schoenberg would probably have been amused at the performers’ choice of Brahms as a representative of the tradition that Schulhoff rejected. When Schoenberg was not bending ears with his “emancipated” dissonances, he was bending minds with his provocative opinions on Brahms being far more progressive than conservative. There is certainly a progressive side to the Opus 78 sonata, but those factors do not suppress its overall mood of nineteenth-century expressiveness. Hope and Kahane certainly did not try to short-change that expressiveness; but they also honored the structural innovations behind Schoenberg’s case for progressivism.
As I observed in my preview piece for this recital, the Messiaen variations were written in 1932 as a wedding present for his first wife, the violinist Claire Delbos. Hope introduced the composition by observing that the most recognizable elements of Messiaen’s style had not yet emerged. I wonder if Kahane would have said the same had he introduced the work. While there may not have been any references to bird songs or other natural sounds, one can detected in the keyboard work many of the rhetorical elements of his more mature compositions, even down to the level of his embellishing tropes. Thus, this music is situated on a pivot between the traditions Messiaen learned at the Paris Conservatoire and the path he took to depart from those traditions.
The Franck sonata thus served as a suitable representative for those traditions, particularly since, like Franck, Messiaen was also an organist. The sonata also complemented the Brahms sonata with its richness of expression, although Franck was more interested in allowing his thematic material to develop across movement boundaries. Thus, as had been the case with the Brahms, this was a performance that found just the right balance between passionate expressiveness and solid respect for structural foundations.
The evening concluded with the violin arrangement of Maurice Ravel’s “Kaddisch,” the first of the 1914 “Deux mélodies hébraïques” for voice and piano. This interpretation of the Jewish prayer for the dead seemed the appropriate way to conclude a program that began with the work of one of the many Jewish victims of the Nazis. Ravel was not necessarily true to the chant source behind this text, but his interpretation is no less profound for that minor detail. Hope and Kahane performed it with all the respect it deserved, bringing a meditative conclusion to a thought-rich evening.
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