Aspen Music Festival (4):
Emerson delivers haunting Shostakovich No. 15:
Song cycles highlight chamber music program 13.07.2006
(HS)
Could any music be more haunting than the Shostakovich
String Quartet No. 15 in E-Flat minor? The way the Emerson
Quartet played it Tuesday in Harris Hall, it's hard to
imagine anything taking a more direct route to the center
of the human soul.
The Russian composer's final
quartet, written in 1974 as he grew sicker from cancer,
heart disease and other ailments, faces death in a totally
personal way. Where Strauss seeks nobility in his "Four
Last Songs" and Verdi scares the bejeebers out of
his audience with the "Dies irae" in his Requiem,
Shostakovich explores the quiet, dark corners of the human
soul.
Musically, the piece is relentlessly
slow. But the Emerson Quartet found an astonishing range
of colors, many of them dark and creepy, in the six movements,
all marked "Adagio." Playing much of the opening
music with no vibrato, or with white tone, they created
a frigid musical environment that still had an eerie beauty.
And then a song wells up from David Finckel's cello like
tenor song, bringing momentary warmth. And again, the
cello combines with Lawrence Dutton's viola for a momentary
balm.
The series of individual,
overlapping crescendos that opens the second movement,
the lapidary violin solo by Philip Setzer in the third,
the gentle interweaving of their lines in the fourth,
all seemed to come from someplace that had nothing to
do with the individual instruments. The jagged rhythms
and instrumental effects of the fifth movement funeral
march tore at the fabric of the music, creating an overwhelming
sense of resignation and, finally, transcendence in the
finale.
The first half of the program,
comprising Shostakovich's 13th and 14th quartets, didn't
have nearly the same impact. They were played well, but
without quite the abandon of the 15th.
After the concert, a friend
asked, "Did you enjoy that?" For a moment, I
had no answer. "Enjoy isn't the word," I said,
finally. "But I treasure the experience."
Two unusual song cycles occupied
most of Monday's chamber music concert, but not until
Louis Ranger, Raymond Mase and Kevin Cobb raised their
trumpets to play Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina's
Trio for Three Trumpets, which had the advantage
over the song cycles of being both short and colorful.
Shostakovich's 1967 "Seven
Verses of Alexandre Blok" accompanies each verse
with a cello (Joseph Lee), violin (Carole Cowan) or piano
(Antoinette Perry) alone or in combination with a soprano
(Jennifer Root). The dramatic soprano's line, unfortunately,
is a lot less interesting than the instrumental.
Marc-André Dalbavie
goes all the way back to medieval music for inspiration,
mostly that of French troubadors, for his Sextine Cyclus,
sung by the lyric soprano Courtney Huffman and a chamber
ensemble conducted by the composer. First time through,
each of the songs charm with modal musical language, medieval
French and restrained harmonies, and Huffman's silvery
voice and pinpoint pitch made it even more likeable. But
by the third or fourth verse of each song, with only minimal
variation in the accompaniment, impatience started to
set in.
Harvey Steiman