SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

 

Gerard Schwarz would surely be the last to claim that his compositions open up any revolutionary new stylistic frontiers. As a busy conductor he is, for much of the time, a denizen of the worlds of classicism and romanticism, and it is natural that as a composer he should draw liberally on those fertile traditions.

 

But as Vaughan Williams pointed out many years ago in A Musical Autobiography, “The object of art is to stretch out to the ultimate realities through the medium of beauty. The duty of the composer is to find the mot juste. It does not matter if this word has been said a thousand times before as long as it is the right thing to say at that moment.”

 

Schwarz’s Horn Trio, commissioned by the Seattle Chamber Music Society and premiered at this concert, seemed to me to say a great many right and beautiful things within its thoroughly accessible romantic idiom, from the shofar-like proclamations of the first movement, by way of an ingeniously constructed central Recitative and Aria, through to a finale that combines hunting-horn jollity with just enough rhythmic variety to avoid any danger of tedium. It is, I think, a stronger piece than Rudolf and Jeanette, written three years ago in memory of the composer’s grandparents, who perished in the Holocaust. Perhaps in that work Schwarz was too closely bound up with his subject.

 

However that may be, the Horn Trio, while in no way short of eloquent feeling, expresses its emotion through more successful stylistic and formal channels. And so far as Vaughan Williams’s priorities are concerned, it offers an illuminating contrast with Jake Heggie’s chamber opera For a Look or a Touch, premiered by Seattle’s valuable Music of Remembrance organization three years ago. For it happens that, at one point in his new work, Schwarz makes much play with the same meltingly lyrical four-note phrase that Heggie’s listeners may have recognized from its ravishing earlier appearance in Richard Strauss’ September (one of the Four Last Songs). But whereas Heggie simply took Strauss’ inspiration over and repeated it again and again without making anything new of it, Schwarz turned the alternation of adjacent pitches into something very much of his own.

 

Monday’s performance, by Seattle Symphony assistant principal horn Jeffrey Fair, violinist Stefan Jackiw, and pianist Adam Neiman, amply deserved the ovation it received. It was unerringly paced and seductive in tone and phrasing. I felt a certain sympathy for Fair. He is a superb musician, and he played beautifully, but not quite as immaculately as in the open rehearsal of the work helpfully presented by SCMS earlier in the day. But that is the nature of his intractable instrument: from the horn, a smudged note here and there is only to be expected, and no just cause for complaint.

 

The program had opened, oddly but entertainingly enough, with a sprightly performance by duo-pianists Ran Dank and Anton Nel of Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants. “Sprightly” would be an enormous understatement if applied to the performance of Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence that ended the evening. Led with the utmost panache by Ida Levin, and wonderfully unanimous in ensemble, this was a veritably unquenchable volcano of supercharged rhythmic zest and tonal opulence.

 

No sooner were we clear of one impassioned climax than the next one came steaming irrepressibly up over the horizon. The only repertoire piece I can think of that rivals Tchaikovsky’s sextet for sheer inability to sit down is the first movement of Schumann’s Second Symphony–and there the energy does at least let up somewhat in succeeding movements, whereas Tchaikovsky keeps it going through all four movements with scarcely a moment’s relaxation. Levin herself, first violist Richard O’Neill, and first cellist Robert deMaine all contributed sumptuously toned solos, and their second-desk colleagues–respectively Emily Daggett Smith, Che-Yen Chen, and Jeremy Turner–projected their largely accompanimental but organically integrated parts with equal artistry.

 

Bernard Jacobson