Tag: string trio

Handel, Ysaÿe, Shostakovich and Mendelssohn – courses and causes at Roseneath’s Long Hall.

Posted on by Peter Mechen
Helene, Rolf and Peter Gjelsten perform Handel at The Long Hall

The Chamber Pot-Pourri Ensemble presents:
GEORG FRIEDRIC HANDEL – Trio Sonata in B Minor
EUGENE YSAŸE – Ballade for Solo Violin Op. 27 No 3*
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartet No. 8 in C Minor
FELIX MENDELSSOHN – String Quartet No.2 in A Minor Op.13

Helene Pohl and Peter Gjelsten* (violins)
Nicholas Hancox (viola) / Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

The Long Hall, Roseneath, Wellington
Saturday, 20th September
(A Concert to Benefit Kaibosh Food Rescue)

Violinist Helene Pohl’s and ‘cellist Rolf Gjelsten’s ever-resourceful Pot-Pourri Ensemble was joined today at the Long Hall by Peter Gjelsten on second violin as well as violist Nicholas Hancox. I’d previously encountered the latter’s excellent contributions to this series on a couple of occasions, but this was my first encounter with violinist Peter Gjelsten (Helene’s and Rolf’s son) in these concerts.

This was a programme which offered interest and delight through music from different eras, containing contrasts and connections of different kinds. Though not presented in chronological order, the pieces’ remarkably varied intensities could be said to form a sequence begun by Handel’s B Minor Trio Sonata No, 1 with its “boldly inventive variety and expressive range” (to quote from another review I happened to read of a recent recording of this work), and continuing throughout Eugène Ysaÿe’s brilliant demonstration of virtuosic violin-playing capabilities in one of his solo Violin Sonatas. With Dmitri Shostakovich’s dark and iconically dissident Eighth String Quartet from 1960 the intensities reached levels of extremity which the extraordinarily accomplished Mendelssohn Quartet that concluded the programme both defused and yet echoed in the music’s youthful impetuosities with considerable confidence and elan.

The opening item required just three players for two violins and a ‘cello, the ensuing combination bringing forth a delightful rendition of Handel’s delectable work, one that straightaway brought to my mind the composer’s wonderful Op.6 Concerti Grossi, and from whose manifold thematic treasury there may have even been some cribbings, as was the composer’s wont in certain instances elsewhere. Exquisite phrasings and ear-catching tonal variations brought gorgeous duetting between the two violins in the opening Andante, and a particularly fetching lead-in to the allegro ma non troppo, with the two violin lines playfully nudging one another, and the ‘cello dancing in attendance – we especially enjoyed, towards the movement’s end, the spicy discord, beautifully resolved.

The Largo which followed, gracefully and ceremonially, brought an opening sequence that was “echoed” in a subtle and more intimate way by the players, before the rather “hunky” finale made its unashamed entrance with its rustic kind of rhythmic  charm. Altogether, it was a perfect “ear-opener” with which to experience both the music’s subtleties and more forceful characterisations of mood in preparation for what was to follow.

Peter Gjelsten then introduced a solo violin item, the Sonata for Solo Violin in D minor ‘Ballade’, Op. 27, No. 3  by Eugène Ysaÿe. a one-movement work from 1923, and the third in a set of six sonatas for solo violin. Each of these works, we were told, was intended as a tribute to a famous contemporary violinist, the first being dedicated to Josef Szigeti, whose performance of one of Bach’s solo violin sonatas was Ysaÿe’s direct inspiration for the set as a whole. Today’s work was dedicated to the Roumanian violinist and composer Georges Enescu.

Ysaÿe begins the work with a rhapsodically ascending, double-stopped figure – an arresting gesture and here compellingly played! Having captured our attention, the music brought us in closer with a musing line, in places partnered by a similarly-inclined harmonising voice. Secure and definite chording joined with the long-breathed lines, the double-stopping assuming a heroic character in places, the young player giving his all to these strongly-chiselled statements, whether lyrically or heroically-stated. An almost furtive, will-o-the wisp character suddenly took over the lines, the music materialising and dematerialising as the notes from the strings responded to a more mercurial touch, out of which the heroic manner emerged even more strongly, and with a more purposeful sense of direction.

As the piece pushed excitingly onwards I got the feeling that the music and player were actually driving one another, sharing in the exhilaration of the quest approaching its raison d’etre, the completion of a uniquely-characterised journey, and one resonantly demonstrated with a resolute ascending double-stopped figure falling onto a single concluding note  –  a splendid “That’s it” gesture! Since the concert, I’ve found a sentence in an article about this music that has enhanced the enjoyment of my memory of Peter Gjelsten’s splendid performance, something which Ysaÿe himself wrote about it: “I have let my imagination wander at will – the memory of my friendship and admiration for George Enescu and the performances we gave together…..have done the rest”.

The musical discourse seemed on a roll by now, having generated sufficient interest and momentum for our sensibilities to be exposed to what seemed would be the afternoon’s most demanding and mind-stretching experience – a performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s well-known Eighth Quartet, a work that’s haunted me for most of my music-listening life ever since hearing a famous 1960s recording (probably the first!) by the Borodin Quartet (though I wasn’t as “close to the cutting edge” as that remark sounds, as I didn’t encounter the recording until the 1970s!).

The work itself has invited plenty of animated discussion regarding what it actually signifies – there are the composer’s own words inscribed on the score – “In memory of victims of fascism and war” and his remarkable completion of the work in three days while on a visit during 1960 to Dresden, the city almost completely destroyed by Allied firebombing in 1945. Set against all of this is conjecture arising from the composer’s liberal use of the notes D-E-flat-C-B, which, in German notation is an abbreviation of his own name, DSCH (the composer had used it before in his Tenth Symphony), a motif which appears right at the work’s beginning, It proceeds to dominate the whole work, appearing in tandem with fragments of other works by Shostakovich – the First, Fifth and Eleventh Symphonies, the Second Piano Trio and the First ‘Cello Concerto – and there’s a significant quotation from the composer’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, So why all this self-quotation in a work dedicated to “victims of fascism and war?”

For those who ascribe to the composer’s posthumously-published (and widely-disputed) memoirs, Testimony, edited by Solomon Volkov, the Quartet’s subject is instead autobiographical, the music directly referring to Shostakovich’s own personal sufferings and sorrow. This view was reinforced by events of that time, of his despair and feelings of guilt having to join the Communist Party when promoted as Head of the Union of Composers of the Soviet Federation – even contemplating the option of suicide (in a letter to a friend Shostakovich wrote re the finished work, “You could write on the cover – “Dedicated to the memory of the composer of this Quartet”).

From the beginning it all feels too self-obsessed and deeply stricken to be anything but an undilutedly personal utterance – the Largo opened with the solo cello voicing the DSCH theme and the other instruments giving the same theme slow canonic treatment. The violin played eerie chromatic lines, echoed later in the movement by the ‘cello, as the accompanying instruments “held the lines”, their implacability creating all kinds of tensions and expectations, with viola and cello steadfastly continuing as the two violins counterpointed their themes – what a wonderful “mini-crescendo” mid-movement with a reiteration of the DSCH theme! – and while the ‘cello played its chromatic figures I could almost “hear” strands of Russian church chanting, before the DSCH theme gathered the strands together for a bit of pre-onslaught bolstering up…..

Almost without warning the Allegro burst upon us, assailing us with the first movement themes presented as vehemently and viciously as possible, and alongside the DSCH motiv, throwing in things like the “massacre” music figurations from the Eleventh Symphony in the lead-up to the Jewish folk-theme – all so heart-rending in this context, the players immersing themselves, body and soul, in the music’s agony! – and with the composer refusing to spare them or us when he reintroduces the DSCH as its own accompaniment before returning to the Jewish tune! – such macabre moments, with the climax followed by a wrenching split-second of silence!

One wondered during that split second whether anything else could be as shocking as what we’d just heard – the answer, when it came with just as much force and similar intent was the black humour of the third movement Allegretto, Helene Pohl’s violin throwing the DSCH motif into the air with spiteful Mephistophelean glee before beginning a waltz whose crude trajectories and mocking tones were further underlined by Peter Gjelsten’s wonderfully eerie violin trills decorating the dance’s obsessive “waltzification” of the DSCH theme. A second theme was even more pitiless in its crudity and brutality, a mood relieved only by the music suddenly switching trajectories and quoting the composer’s First ‘Cello Concerto (but with the ‘cello theme played by the violin). Then while the violins played a strangely wind-blown chromatic sequence, Rolf Gjelsten’s cello in its high register gave us a stunningly eerie-sounding passage, the music seeming as though it had lost its way – after a few more desultory waltz-measures, and another ‘Cello Concerto quote, the violin then retreated into a self-communing world, leaving the remaining instruments to rap out an ominous three-note tattoo, by way of signalling the Largo fourth movement’s arrival, a motif that recurred at various stages.

This movement’s rather more Janus-faced character was evident in its alternation  between the sobering appearances of both the DSCH quotation and the hammering three-note motif’ and what proved to be the work’s most poignant expressions of human emotion – firstly came a lament-like quote from the Eleventh Symphony, and then a moving sequence from a revolutionary song “Exhausted by the hardships of prison”, with the melody played on the violin. However the most beautiful of these was an excerpt from an aria sung by the principal character, Katarina, from the composer’s opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”, here played most affectingly on the ‘cello’s high register by Rolf Gjelsten. And even though the sequence’s last word (continuing into the final movement) was the lately ubiquitous “hammering” motif, the presence of these glimmerings of a universal kind of human spirit testified to the power of hope in the most outwardly unpromising circumstances.

No easy solution, then, was forthcoming – and the finale’s music simply deepened the work’s enigmatic profile, reinforcing the idea of the Quartet as “autobiographical”  – We heard the DSCH motive introduce the finale, lightened by a kind of counter-melody, but offering little actual redemption, leading to a dark and final reprise of those ineffably enigmatic notes before they disappeared into the silences. We sat at the end, stunned by the immediacy of it all, uncomfortably mindful of the music’s delineations of an individual’s tragedy which continues to speak for countless numbers of people – there, but for fortune awaits the world’s sorrow for any of us.

What a relief, then, after the interval, to journey into a different world, that of a young and gifted composer who’d encountered love for the first time and bravely borne its loss, both in life and in his music! Felix Mendelssohn was a child prodigy comparable to Mozart (Robert Schumann called him “the Mozart of the 19th Century), and at the time of writing the A Minor String Quartet we were about to hear, the 18 year-old had already produced 12 String symphonies, a String Quintet, the first of his five “mature” symphonies, the Overture “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and his renowned “Octet” for strings, not to mention a number of unpublished earlier string quartets. The Quartet showed the influence of Beethoven’s late quartets, especially the latter’s inclinations towards cyclic form which many later nineteenth-century composers were to fully exploit – here, one of Mendelssohn’s own songs, Frage (“Question”) Op.9, No. 1 haunted each of the movements (the composer actually had the song published in tandem with the quartet to emphasise the connection).

Such a romantic and lyrical opening! – one that immediately bore out what cellist Rolf Gjelsten said in his introduction about music one readily imagines as having words being sung  – I loved, for instance, the loaded three-note phrase practically speaking the words “Is es wahr?” (Is it true?), just before the music swept into the Allegro vivace in the key of A Minor, aptly suggesting a telling degree of angst in the notes’ expression – (how often were composers from Beethoven onwards to use that same three note-progression for various expressive purposes, with both Liszt and Brahms immediately coming to mind!).

Being new to this work I couldn’t help but be astonished by its sheer facility, with interaction between all the players worked into a seamless flow, and no part seemingly relegated to that of a mere accompanist – no wonder that a contemporary listener to one of the young Mendelssohn’s similar efforts was overheard to say to a companion – “Which quartet of Beethoven’s is this?”

Similarly, in the Adagio non lento movement which followed, the fugato section, deliciously played, captivated with its feeling of integration of all the voices, the young composer then daring to insert a kind of dancing fugal holiday for the players, with the theme an enthusiastic, if sometimes inverted, and in places, even wayward and rumbustious fellow-traveller. By way of helping to restore order, the players then gave the return of the opening a gentle, jewelled-like rite of passage to the finish.

The Intermezzo was next, dancing its somewhat circumspect way along, when it was more-or-less “ambushed” by allegro di molto fairy-music with at first wonderfully-confusing rhythmic patternings for this hapless listener (I was eventually “sorted”, here, even without being rich!), and with lyrical lines deftly floating over the scamperings! – having run out of “puff”, the music slowed and regained its composure (with a brief but delightful whimsical coda!) – then, suddenly, from our fairyland-like observation-platforms we were assailed with fierce tremolandi from the lower strings and an anguished recitative from the first violin, the strings tumbling down a slope towards a second-tier onslaught (not quite as fierce!) of more tremolandi, this time gathering up the voices and proceeding with the finale’s agitations – dramatic stuff!

We heard fast-moving passages revisiting the first-movement’s agitations, interspersed with recitative-like sequences, and another fugal-like sequence launched, as in the second movement, by Nicholas Hancox’s sonorous, ever-steady viola – the reappearance of the tremolandi that began the movement’s precipitate beginning still carried some of the young composer’s “hurt”, but after further agitations and deliberations, a third and final recitative-like series of more circumspect tremolandi-like gestures indicated a softening of resolve, as did a poignant return of the quartet’s opening. A final sounding of the three-note “Is es wahr” phrase and the dream of love was put to rest – perhaps the youthful Mendelssohn’s most candid outpouring of emotion in music, and done rich and sensitive justice here by these players.

Brilliance and feeling from the Mazzoli Trio at Lower Hutt

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music Hutt Valley presents:

MAZZOLI STRING TRIO

Julie Park (viola), Sally Kim (‘cello), Shauno Isomura (violin)

SCHUBERT –  Trio in B-flat Major D.471
A. RITCHIE – Spring String Trio (2013)
FRANCAIX – String Trio (1933)
MISSY MAZZOLI – Lies You Can Believe In (2006)
HAYDN – Trio in G Major Op.53/1
DOHNANYI – Serenade Op.10

Lower Hutt Little Theatre,

Monday, 26th March 2018

Formed in 2015 by students from the University of Auckland and the Pettman National Junior Academy of Music, the Mazzoli Trio, so the story goes, took its name from that of a composer of a piece of music which was one of the first the trio of musicians had prepared. They had fallen in love with the piece, one called “Lies You Can Believe In”, written by up-and-coming New York composer Missy Mazzoli, and thereupon contacted her to ask if she would allow the Trio to use her name, as well as perform her music. And so a new and vital ensemble was born, with its first major assignment in public an invitation to perform at a concert at the 2nd International Pacific Alliance of Music Schools’ Summit in Beijing, China, an occasion which brought them much acclaim regarding both their playing and the repertoire chosen.

Monday evening’s concert at the Lower Hutt Little Theatre was one of a number of appearances by the Trio throughout the North Island organised by Chamber Music New Zealand. The programme seemed a judiciously chosen selection of works both familiar and intriguing, with the Trio’s “signature work”, by Missy Mazzoli, promising to be one of the evening’s particular fascinations. Interestingly, both halves of the concert had their order as per programme changed, which left me to wonder whether there had been a simple misunderstanding between the musicians and the printers, or, alternatively represented a significant rethink by the musicians of a previously existing order. Whatever the case, it made not the slightest difference to our anticipated enjoyment and receptivity of the concert.

So, instead of beginning the evening’s music with Anthony Ritchie’s “Spring String Trio”, we heard instead Schubert’s B-flat Major Trio D.471, a work in a single movement, which was played with such freshness and simplicity of wide-eyed wonderment that our hearts were instantly captured. What struck me instantly about the playing was that, despite the Trio’s obvious youth the music-making was imbued with such character. Part of this came from the players’ awareness of the interactiveness of the different instruments, each ready to assert and then give way, beautifully dovetailing the various musical arguments, and delighting the ear in doing so. We enjoyed the “shape” of the piece, its vivid contourings through the opening’s lyricism and contrasting dynamism, and the music’s intensification throughout the development, before the eventual “unravelling” of these tensions, instigated by the opening’s reprise via its warmth and familiarity. I thought the playing most importantly caught that unique Schubertian mix of charm, sunniness and tension which characterises his music.

I must admit to being intrigued at Anthony Ritchie’s work having been, according to the programme, the result of a commission concerning none other than (Sir) Robert Jones, somebody about whom I have very few positive feelings – however, I suppose composers have to earn a living! Banishing all thoughts of the association from my mind I settled down to enjoy the music, and was straightaway drawn into a dark-browed world of almost Shostakovich-like angst, a kind of “charged calmness”, out of which grew structured, contrapuntal exchanges almost baroque-like in their ordering, with everything creating a real sense of expectation, both in a formal and emotional sense.

This feeling bore fruit with the players’ energetic launching of vigorous, almost hoe-down-like passages, which in places either “took to the road” or drew from the irresistible momentum of a steam train (the music’s motoric quality not surprising in a composer with avowed admiration for Shostakovich’s music), a sequence which, after taking us places most exhilaratingly suddenly ceased its physicalities and became thoughtful and even melancholic. By this time, I was completely at the mercy of the music-making, drawn in by these musicians’ concentration and focus, the instrumental tones here given increasing weight and strength as to achieve a splendid kind of apotheosis, with the composer seemingly bringing the work’s essential elements triumphantly together at the conclusion, before cheekily throwing the last bars to the four winds! – great stuff!

Even cheekier entertainment was provided by French composer Jean Francaix (1912-1997), whose music was described most aptly in the programme as having “wit, lightness and a conversational interplay”. Writing his first pieces at the age of six, he once remarked that he was “constantly composing” and over the course of his long life wrote over two hundred pieces in a variety of styles and genres. His String Trio of 1933 began with hide-and-seek scamperings expressed in largely will-o’the-wisp tones, the instruments occasionally showing their faces and striking attitudes in mock-seriousness, before grinning impudently and skipping out of reach once more, the movement finishing on a po-faced pizzicato note.

The Scherzo presented itself as a wild, lurching waltz, replete with impish mischief and surprising orchestral-like effects, such as sharp-edged pizzicati that made one jump! The musicians entered into the music’s spirit with great relish, bringing out both the contrasting episodes of melancholy hand-in-glove with their humorous undersides – at one stage the sounds resembled instruments duelling with pizzicato notes – “Take that! – and that! – and THAT!”. The Andante which followed made a wistful, melancholic impression, with the violinist’s instrument singing disconsolately, while being rocked and comforted by the viola and ‘cello.  The melody was taken over by the cello and counterpointed by the viola, giving rise to sounds and feelings of a great loveliness – for whatever reason I was put in mind of Vaughan Williams’ music, by way of imagining the music written with the viola as the leading voice.

The Rondo finale, marked “Vivo”, wasted no time in making its presence felt, with great dynamics at the outset, and the composer’s singular invention regarding the accompanying rhythms leaving us wondering what to expect and where to be taken next! A bout of upper-register exploration left the music momentarily frightened by its own angsts, before emerging, albeit a little cautiously, from its own melt-down, the viola taking the initiative and restoring control and morale, leading the music into and through a mock-march of triumph, with (one senses) no prisoners being taken!

After the interval, we were told of another “running order” change to the programme, the last being made first this time round, with the piece written by the Trio’s namesake, Missy Mazzoli, divertingly called “Lies You Can Believe In”, beginning the concert’s second half. Called by its composer “An improvisatory tale”, the music draws from what the composer calls “the violence, energy and rare calm one finds in a city”. Written in 2006 for a Milwaukee-based ensemble, Present Music, the piece seems to throw everything within reach at the listener by way of introduction, the rhythms fierce, driving and syncopated, the lines both focusing and blurring the laser-like unisons, which disconcert by unexpectedly melting into warm and fruity expressions of melancholy. The Trio’s total involvement with this material swept our sensibilities up into its maelstrom of variety, with all the aforementioned characteristics the composer required of the piece’s presentation.

In tandem with the driving rhythms and spiky accents come lyrical instrumental solos – one for the ‘cello at first and then another for the viola – contributing to the music’s volatility and echoing the ambiguities of the piece’s title. There’s even a “twilight-zone” sequence of eerie, other-worldly harmonics, as the instruments move the music through a kind of wasteland, one which suddenly explodes into life with “Grosse Fugue-like” driving syncopations, the cello playing a sinuously exotic, decadently sliding theme as its companions push the repeated notes along. In characteristic fashion it all comes to an end as the rhythms become disjointed and break up, taking their leave of us with a rhythmically curt unison gesture. Whether we’d made sense of what we’d been through suddenly seemed less to matter than the experience itself, as Alan Jay Lerner put it in “My Fair Lady”, a heady sample of “humanity’s mad, inhuman noise”.

Perhaps some eighteenth-century sensibilities thought much the same of some of Josef Haydn’s more original manifestations of creativity, such as with his String Trio Op.53 No.1 (actually a transcription of the Piano Sonata Hob.XV1:40/1). At the outset the music breathes out-of-doors country pleasures, the aristocracy amusing themselves at play, though the music’s minor-key change midway the first movement readily suggests “trouble at mill”, with its range of outward emotion, the players here making the most of the contrast between whole-hearted expressiveness and near-furtive withdrawal of tones. When the graceful dance returned I thought the cellist so very expressive in her music-making gestures, bringing it all so vividly to life, as did her companions during the music’s precipitious return to the previous agitations, and the gentle gathering-up of fraught sensibilities – wonderfully soft playing from all concerned!

The second movement’s scampering presto immediately reminded me of the finale of the composer’s C-Major ‘Cello Concerto, the musicians’ soft, rapid playing a tantalising joy! Of course these would have been brilliantly effective on the keyboard as well, but the extra colour and textural contrasts afforded by the trio brought special delight, with the rhythmic syncopations deliciously underlined. In this way, the work was brought to a rousing conclusion which we in the audience thoroughly relished.

There remained of this well-stocked programme a work by Ernst von Dohnanyi, best-known to an earlier generation by his work for piano and orchestra “Variations on a Nursery Theme”, but more recently for his chamber music. Feted as a virtuoso pianist in his youth, Dohnanyi soon took up composition, influenced mostly by the work of Brahms and the German romantics, though he was to promote the music and activities of his fellow Hungarian composers, Bartok and Kodaly while teaching at the Budapest Academy. Differences with both pre- and post-War regimes in Hungary forced him into exile, firstly in Argentina, and then in the United States, where he took out citizenship and remained for the rest of his life.

His five-movement Serenade for String Trio, dating from 1902/3, was one of the first works in which Dohnanyi felt his own voice had properly sounded, rather less in thrall to late-Romantic models, and with touches of the “real” Hungarian folk-music influence that Bartok and Kodaly would soon begin to explore in earnest. Right at the beginning of the opening March, the music sounded like a Hungarian Brahms, with rather more of the former than the latter, flavoursome folk-fiddle treatment of the material from violin and ‘cello, and a drone-accompaniment from the viola. A soft pizzicato dance accompanied a beautifully folkish, Kodaly-like melody from the viola, the instrument then accompanying its companions’ heartfelt dialogues with evocative arpeggio-like figurations  resembling those of the solo viola in Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy”.

Mischievous fugal-like scurryings of different lines from all three instruments began the scherzo, which occasionally brought the voices together in fierce unisons. The trio section’s graceful, song-like measures, reminiscent of Schubert’s music for “Rosamunde” in places featured some affectionately-sounded dovetailings, reflecting the music-making’s warmly co-operative aspect.

In the slow movement’s Theme and Variations, the opening was presented to us as “a special moment gone somehow wrong”, the melody attempting to keep its poise and grace, but darkening in mood at its end. The variations exhibited plenty of character and differently-focused purpose, seemingly running the emotional gamut from agitation and fright to tremulous melancholy. After these angsts we needed the jollity of the finale’s opening to return us to our lives – and here the playing brought out both the girth and the grace of the dancers, as well as excitingly varying the pulse and pace of the music. Eventually the sounds cycled all the way back to the work’s richly Magyar opening, thus binding the work and its singular ambiences of unique expression together. What playing from these people! – so very youthful and energetic, while commanding responses to the music of such warmth and understanding and character.