Reverse chronology

Paul Hersh performed on both viola and piano at last night’s Faculty Artist Series recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music;  and, when he sat at the piano keyboard, it was to accompany his viola student.  So the viola played a key role on the program, which offered three works by British composers performed in reverse chronological order.  Given that each of these works was, in its own way, decidedly forward-looking, this ordering gave some sense of what earlier composers were seeking and what actually came to pass.  One might almost have called the entire program “Remembrances of Things Future;”  but, since remembrance was the focus of Hersh’s last program, his theme for this one had more to do with reflection.

Indeed, that concept of reflection was present in the title of the first work on the program, “Lachrymae:  Reflections on a Song of John Dowland,” Benjamin Britten’s Opus 48 for viola and piano, composed in 1950 and dedicated to the violist William Primrose.  In his (always informative) prefatory remarks, Hersh observed the double meaning behind the use of the noun “reflection” in Britten’s title.  The primary definition was probably the cognitive one, pursuing a chain of thoughts about Dowland’s music and expressing those thoughts through a new statement of music.  However, those thoughts turned to the more physical semantics of reflection, involving the creation of a “virtual object” (which could be auditory, rather than visual) through the properties of a reflecting surface.  Because every such surface has imperfections (some more than others), no virtual object is ever a reproduction of the physical object being reflected.  Rather, to return to the Aristotelian terminology I applied to Hersh’s Remembrances recital, the virtual object is an imitation of the physical, in the same way that, in Edvard Grieg’s cycle of Lyric Pieces the “Arietta” that begins Opus 12, Number 1 is “reflected” to the end of the cycle in Opus 71, Number 7.  Like an Aristotelian imitation, the reflected object may introduce layers of significance that are less evident in the source.

In Britten’s case the primary source is the song “If my complaints could passions move,” which serves as the basis for a set of variations.  However, these variations play out in their own “reverse chronology.”  Each “reflects” certain aspects of the theme;  but the theme itself is deferred until it unfolds from the final variation.  This is very much in the spirit of a frequently-used cinematic trick that begins with some abstract array of colors.  As the camera pulls back, the viewer realizes that the image is that of the surface of water, such as a river.  The camera keeps pulling back, and eventually one sees the actual objects being reflected by that surface.  (Britten would apply this same structural strategy in 1963 in his Opus 70 for solo guitar, “Nocturnal after John Dowland.”)

Britten’s title is, itself, a take on this view of reflection.  Dowland’s song was first published as the fourth in his First Booke of Songes or Ayers in 1597;  but in 1604 it reappeared with the new title, “Captiaine Digorie Piper his Galliard” in a new collection entitled Lachrimæ.  This collection also included the “Lachrimæ Antiquae” (originally published in the Second Booke of Songs or Ayres as “Flow my tears”), which makes a brief appearance in the Appassionato variation.  All this would seem to suggest that one cannot really listen to Britten’s music without a fair amount of familiarity with those Dowland “objects being reflected.”  For this reason Hersh enlisted one of the vocal students to sing “If my complaints could passions move” (accompanied by a guitar student) before he began his performance of Britten’s reflections.

The time he invested to familiarize his audience with this composition was well spent.  Hersh on viola with his accompanist, his former piano student and Conservatory alumna Teresa Yu, skillfully negotiated what amounts to a “hall of mirrors” that Britten had constructed around his Dowland sources.  Through those introductory remarks one could better appreciate each of the “virtual objects” in Britten’s reflections and apprehend their respective imitative natures.  There was also a clear sense that the performance not only executed the reflections in Britten’s score but also suggested that Britten was not only reflecting on Dowland’s texts but also on the practices of making music in his day.  However much cerebral effort may have gone in Britten’s score, what mattered most was a “bridge across the centuries” linking what Dowland and his colleagues did with what musicians continue to do today.

The next stop on Hersh’s reverse chronological journey was 1922, the year in which Arnold Bax composed his viola sonata.  Hersh prepared an entire recital of the music of Bax almost exactly a year ago, in which the viola played a major role;  and the 1922 sonata is more mature than two of the works performed at this earlier recital, the 1906 single-movement trio for piano, violin, and viola and the 1916 “Elegiac Trio” for flute, viola, and harp.  In introducing this sonata Hersh emphasized the richness of Bax’ harmonic language, dwelling upon his ability to take a single theme and subject it to a variety of strikingly diverse harmonic colorations.  He neglected to say very much about the intensity of Bax’ energy, most evident in the wild Allegro energico e no troppo presto second movement scherzo but just as present in the slow passages that frame the beginning and conclusion of the sonata.  Hersh’s student showed no fear in taking on the broad range of demands set by this composition, but she had the advantage of Hersh himself as a supportive accompanist.  Over on the audience side we can only hope that Hersh will continue to champion Bax’ accomplishments, since each of his presentations leaves one curious about what else may be in store.

Following the intermission, the program concluded with Edward Elgar’s Opus 84 piano quintet in A minor, completed in 1919.  In many respects this is a Janus-faced composition that regards both past and future simultaneously.  One cannot listen to many of the piano passages without thinking of Johannes Brahms, and the same can probably be said of the richness of each of the individual string voices.  However, there is an intensity of expressiveness that seems to depart from Brahms’ C minor piano quartet (Opus 60) and then proceeds to raise the level notch-by-notch as the quintet progresses through its three movements.  The overall architecture almost seems to move beyond Brahms into Gustav Mahler’s domain, but there does not seem to be any record of Elgar having been exposed to Mahler’s work.  Most Mahler-like is the overall rhetoric that pivots around highly volatile mood shifts.  Elgar may not have heard this in Mahler, but most of us in the audience were familiar with Mahler’s techniques.  Those techniques could then dispose our listening skills to appreciate Elgar’s own approach to them.

Hersh joined an ensemble of students, taking the viola part.  This was a group well-versed in the traditions Brahms had set.  With those traditions as background, they could then address how Elgar moved forward with his own approaches to expressiveness.  The result was a stimulating execution of a composition that, to my own personal regret, never seems to receive very much attention.  Indeed, the entire evening seems to have been dedicated to raising awareness of seldom-performed works, which is probably one of the most important “public services” that the San Francisco Conservatory can provide.