SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Ives: Violin Sonata No. 3
d’Indy: Piano Trio en Forme de Suite
Prokofiev: Sonata for Two Violins
Chopin: Mazurka Op. 67 No. 4; Waltz Op. 69 No. 2; Waltz Op. 42
Brahms: Piano Trio No. 3 in C minor

and

Brahms: Olympic Music Festival, Quilcene, WA, 2.8.2009 (BJ)
Piano Quintet
Piano Trio No. 3 in C minor
String Quintet No. 2 in G major

Riches indeed: two performances of Brahms’s great Op. 101 Trio within five days, plus a performance of his Piano Quintet at the Olympic Music Festival to set alongside the Seattle Chamber Music Society performance of that masterpiece just three weeks earlier.

At the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Lakeside School evening, there were other composers to be heard, in mostly excellent performances. For the pre-concert recital, Soovin Kim and Jeremy Denk (the latter also providing an excellent introductory explication) played Ives’s Third Violin Sonata with invigorating zest. In the concert proper, Kim, cellist Ronald Thomas, and pianist Adam Neiman did their manful best with d’Indy’s discursively banal Trio “in the form of a suite,” and this was followed by a persuasive account of Prokofiev’s imaginative and tuneful Sonata for Two Violins by Erin Keefe and Stefan Jackiw.

After intermission, Ran Dank offered three Chopin dance pieces as a late addition to a program otherwise judged too short by the radio station that was broadcasting it. The young Israeli played with much fervor. Violinist Stephen Rose and cellist Robert deMaine then joined him in a passionate and often compelling performance of the Brahms Trio. So far as the pianist is concerned, the passing years will surely add a wider range of expression to the more straightforward virtues of clarity and rhythmic impetus that this talented artist already possesses. But at Quilcene the following weekend the sheer wisdom and tonal warmth of Paul Hersh’s piano-playing cast the work in an altogether more revelatory light.

Hersh was strongly partnered in the trio by violinist Kevin Kumar and cellist Amy Sue Barston. Before intermission Kumar had played second violin to Megumi Stohs in the Piano Quintet, which also featured festival director Alan Iglitzin on viola. Their performance clearly outshone the somewhat superficial one I had heard at Lakeside last month, and the final phrase, unconvincingly shaped by the SCMS performers, was thrown off by the Olympians with exactly the right sense of offbeat insouciance. Any complaints? Only one, and that was of a sin of omission : I know this was a long program, but that is no excuse for omitting the exposition repeat in the first movement, thereby robbing the little three-note figure that leads into the development section of its teasing ambiguity.

The Trio allowed Kumar to demonstrate that, in addition to making an utterly beautiful sound, he is a born leader, and the performance responded to every last facet of a work gigantic in stature despite playing for only about 23 minutes. Most composers cover an expanding canvas as they grow older, but Brahms developed in the opposite direction, achieving in his late years a concision and concentration beyond the reach of even his most economically structured early works.

In his introductory remarks, Hersh aptly cited Donald Tovey’s observation that the Trio’s hushed second movement “hurries by like a frightened child.” For my part, I cannot resist quoting the great English musicologist’s equally insightful comment on what happens in the first movement’s subordinate theme. Here Brahms, accompanying the piano’s restatement of the theme with pizzicatos on the two string instruments, achieves what Tovey calls “one of the most exciting sounds ever imagined in chamber music,” and he adds that the pizzicatos in the cello part reveal “another point, inasmuch as there is not one composer in a hundred, especially among ‘great colourists,’ who could be trusted not to make chords of them instead of single notes. But the bass of such chords vanishes before the top, unless the player puts all his accent below, a precaution which is impossible in any tone above mezzo-forte. Single notes, which look so humble on paper, provide the only sonorous bass, and, blended with the playing of a pianist who has a Bayreuth contrabass-tubist’s knowledge of the weight of his instrument, give all their weight to the chords of the violin.”

In the light of my previous comments on Paul Hersh, it is perhaps superfluous to add that he played his part here to perfection. And then, mirabile dictu, he exchanged the piano for the viola to join his colleagues in the G-major String Quintet that Brahms wrote in 1890. The interplay of Hersh’s rare 16th-century instrument by Zanetto Micheli of Brescia, on which he produces a remarkably vibrant pizzicato, with Iglitzin’s slightly later and no less marvelous Gasparo da Salò viola was fascinating. Along with Kumar’s and Stohs’s eloquent violin-playing, and with Barston’s vivid realization of the cruelly taxing cello part, the result superbly realized a work as sumptuous in tone and expression as it is inexhaustibly inventive in rhythm.

Bernard Jacobson