Second Evening With The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Mesmerizes

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 13 July 2023 15:29

Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Cherylynn Tsushima

At Alice Tully Hall, on the evening of Tuesday, July 11th, I had the great pleasure to attend another excellent concert—of nineteenth and twentieth century French and Russian compositions for wind ensembles—presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the second of four in its Summer Evenings series. 

The program began very promisingly with an admirable account of the charming and inventive—at moments, even exquisite—Caprice on Danish and Russian Airs of 1887 by Camille Saint-Saëns, with Adam Walker on the flute, James Austin Smith on the oboe, David Shifrin on clarinet, and Michael Stephen Brown on piano. Program annotator Kathryn Bacasmot provides some interesting background on the history of the work:

In 1887, Saint-Saëns invited oboist Georges Gillet, clarinetist Charles Turban, and flutist Paul Taffanel to participate in a tour to Saint Petersburg for a series of concerts with the Imperial Opera Orchestra. The Caprice on Danish and Russian Airs was written specifically for the visit and dedicated to the Empress Maria Feodorovna, who was born a Danish Princess (Dagmar of Denmark). 

She adds:

Despite some disruptive bouts with cold temperatures and snow, the performances were extremely well received, with the audience particularly impressed by the wind players’ virtuosity. One anecdote relates that Anton Rubinstein, founder and director of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, was so impressed he required all of the wind instrument students to attend one of the concerts. 

Brown returned to the stage along with horn-player David Byrd-Marrow for an admirable version of another appealing piece: the Villanelle of 1905 by Paul Dukas. Again, Bacasmot is informative here:

The composition of Villanelle came out of a particularly unusual series of events. For five years between 1900 and 1905, Maurice Ravel failed to win the Prix de Rome, a situation so preposterous that it ballooned into a full-scale scandal, known as “L’affaire Ravel.” The culprit became comically obvious when all of the 1905 finalists were discovered to be the students of one jury member. In the aftermath, Gabriel Fauré was hired as the new director of the Conservatoire, which administered the prize, and was tasked with rehabilitating the respectability of the institution. As part of his slew of reforms, Fauré decided new examination repertoire was needed and approached Dukas to fulfill the commission for Professor Brémond’s horn class. Since Dukas was rushing to finish other work, he pushed the completion of the examination piece to the last minute, relaying in a letter to his publisher, “I finished it yesterday at one thirty in the morning, after having received a telegram from Fauré telling me that Brémont [sic] was tearing out his hair!” The examination competitions were open to the public, but the first concert performance outside the Conservatoire took place in the Salle Érard in January 1907, and the work was swiftly adopted into the repertoire of performers.

The first half of the event concluded enjoyably with an accomplished performance of the striking Quintet of Jean Françaix from 1948, for which Walker, Smith, Shifrin and Byrd-Marrow were joined by bassoonist Marc Goldberg. Bacasmot notes the following:

The Quintet was written on a commission from the principal horn of the French Radio Orchestra, Louis Courtinat, who sought a work that demanded a high level of virtuosity from each player. Françaix delivered, noting with amusement that “When they sight-read the piece, they found that I had been a little over-zealous.”

The opening movement begins eccentrically and is playful on the whole: equally quirky and ludic is the second, marked Presto, but with a slower, more introspective Trio section. The ensuing Andante is more sustainedly inward—even, at times, lyrical—with some of the work’s most beautiful writing, while the finale is cheerful and propulsive.

Even stronger was the second half of the concert, starting with a remarkable version of François Poleunc’s ingenious Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano from 1926, which opens dramatically although the main body of the movement is vivacious—but with a meditative, more somber interlude—and, like the work in general, overtly classicizing. The succeeding Andante con moto is plaintive, if acquiring some sense of urgency at intervals, and the finale, is sprightly, with some dreamy passages—the placement of quotations from the Scherzo of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony amidst the modernist inflections creates an unusual effect.

The program closed marvelously with a superior realization of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s enchanting—and according to Shifrin, seldom played—Quintet in B-flat major for Flute, Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn, and Piano from 1876 about which Bacasmot recounts:

Two of Rimsky-Korsakov’s early chamber works, his String Sextet and his Wind Quintet in B-flat major, were written in 1876 and entered into a competition. The disappointing outcome was recounted by Rimsky- Korsakov in his memoir, My Musical Life:

The fate of my Sextet and my Quintet (sent in for the prize competition) was as follows. The jury awarded the prize to Napravnik’s Trio with the motto “God loves Trinity” (all good things come in threes); it found my Sextet worthy of honourable mention but disregarded my quintet entirely along with the works of other competitors. It was said that Leschetizky had played Napravnik’s Trio beautifully at sight for the jury, whereas my Quintet had fallen into hands of Cross, a mediocre sight reader, who had made such a fiasco of it that the work was not even heard to the end. Had my Quintet been fortunate in the performer, it would surely have attracted the jury’s attention. Its fiasco at the competition was undeserved, nevertheless, for it pleased the audience greatly, when Y. Goldstein played it subsequently at a concert of the Saint Petersburg Chamber Music Society.

The energetic first movement—and the piece as a whole—is surprisingly classical for a composer noted for his Romantic nationalism while the Andante is exceptionally pretty; the memorable Allegretto finale is jocular and spirited. The artists earned an appreciative reception.

The series continues on the early evening of Sunday, July 16th.

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