SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL  REPORT
 

Aspen Music Festival (3): McGegan and friends do Vivaldi, Telemann, Corelli; David Finckel and Wu Han take on all five Beethoven cello sonatas.15.7.2010 (HS)

 

Virtually every cellist, great and not so great, plays the Beethoven sonatas. For most, every performance means getting on the same page with another pianist. When star cellists and star pianists get together, our pleasure as listeners is mostly in appreciating their virtuosity and individual approaches to the music.

 

When David Finckel and Wu Han play, it simply reaches another plane. Finckel, the cellist in the Emerson Quartet, has the advantage of making this music with his wife, who is a superb pianist in her own right and specializes in playing chamber music with a long list of world-class musicians. They are members of the festival and school’s faculty.

 

And they really know this music. Several years ago, over two nights, they played all five sonatas plus others that Beethoven never assigned to opus numbers. It was a revelation to hear Beethoven’s musical progression through the cello, an arc we usually etch through the nine symphonies or the 16 quartets.

 

They played all five sonatas with opus numbers in a 2 hour 20 minute concert Wednesday night in the same venue, the 500-seat Harris Hall. Their interpretations had extraordinary depth and definition. It was easy to follow the arc of Beethoven’s musical development. The first two sonatas come relatively early in his career, the third from the amazingly fecund middle period, the Op. 69 sandwiched between the Symphony No. 6 and the Ghost Trio. The final two date from the transition to his late period.

 

But what struck me most vividly was the extraordinary degree of communication. In her introduction to the Sonata No. 3, the pianist related Beethoven’s increasing maturity and depth as a composer to the way he wrote for the two instruments. “They are finishing each other’s sentences,” she said. The same could be said of Finckel and Han. They finish each other’s musical thoughts. No, it goes beyond that. They anticipate and complete each other musically.

 

That is a beautiful thing to behold, especially when the technical abilities are so strong. Finckel, playing the entire set from memory, makes his instrument sing, and not just in the easy-to-apprehend long melodies. Many cellists will accept a scratchy sound on quick runs, but not Finckel. Every note sounds. Articulation and intonation seldom miss. Rhythms bounce.

 

For her part Han brings crisp articulation and a touch that can shape dynamics, tone and subtle pedal work to create supple phrases, then whiplash into tight rhythms. It’s fun to watch her relate to the musicians she plays with. She often turns her doll-like face before a key phrase to better match an entrance. She understands the music, knows from experience what to bring out, what to be alert for.

 

The results in this concert were reference-level performances. No. 1 was nice, but No. 2 brought out the extra depth in Beethoven’s writing. No. 4 and No. 5 laid out the composer’s experiments with form and harmony unflinchingly, an endlessly absorbing thing to hear. Apparently, however, it wasn’t enough for a significant percentage of the sold-out audience, about one-third of which filtered out at intermission.

 

Many of them missed No. 3, the centerpiece of the concert, which ably made the case that this should be considered among Beethoven’s most profound works. The give-and-take between cellist and pianist becomes the raison d’être of this music, and with the musicians’ level of communication the piece simply came to life and inhabited the space.

 

Conductor Nicholas McGegan brought a different kind of musical communication to Harris Hall on Tuesday night, leading an orchestra and soloists that mixed students with faculty artists on a romp through the Baroque. Several of the orchestral players changed at the last minute. Cellist Michael Mermagen, originally assigned only to a solo slot on a couple of concertos, sight-read the music for the continuo through the evening. McGegan also noted other fill-ins. His pick-up band did well.

 

Faculty artists taking solo roles included John Zirbel on horn, Jeannett Bittar on oboe, Per Hannevold on bassoon, and Gil Shaham, Adele Anthony, Naoko Tanaka and Cho-Liang Lin on violin, often performing with their students. Their joie-de-vivre and quest for fun in this music matched McGegan’s, which is saying something. He brings more energy and joy to a performance than any three conductors combined, here leading the proceedings from a harpsichord and telling sometimes off-color stories about the composers.

 

The highlights included a pedal-to-the-medal horn duo of Zirbel and his student Michael Oswald in a Vivaldi concerto for winds and violin, which opened the concert with bravado. They returned later for a sensational, amazingly accurate run through the high-risk Telemann Concerto for Two Horns in F Major.

 

Shaham and his wife, Anthony, brought refinement to Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Violins. Earlier, Tanaka, a founding member of the Orpheus Ensemble, joined them for some tasty Telemann Tafelmusik in F Major. To finish the concert, students Stephanie Jeong and Ken Hamao joined Shaham and Anthony for a refreshing and highly danceable Concerto for Four Violins in B minor. A riotous time was had by all.

 

Lin joined Finckel and Han for more great Beethoven, the Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat major, on Monday’s faculty chamber music recital, also in Harris Hall. They caught all the nuances of one of Beethoven’s earliest works, when the composer was still breaking the ties that bound him musically to Haydn and Mozart. Contrast with that enhanced the opulence of the Fauré Piano Quartet, which followed, played by violinist Paul Kantor, violist James Dunham, cellist Darrett Adkin and pianist Virginia Weckstrom.

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