Hard to believe we are coming to the end of another wonderful Palladium Chamber Players season. The final concert, featuring Jeffrey Multer and the Mile-End Trio, is Wednesday, May 9 at 7:30.
Marika Bournaki, piano, and Julian Schwarz, cello, wowed our January audience and this program, with works by Haydn, Brahms and Ravel, promises to be just as exciting.
We will also be annoucing our dates for next season’s chamber series. And, of course, the post-concert reception will be catered by our Chamber Players season supporter, The Princess Martha. For tickets and information call our box office at 727-822-3590 or follow this link for on-line tickets and info.
Our friend Kurt Loft, the best classical music writer around, has again done our program notes. They will be included in the program at the concert, but you can read them here. I’ll turn the rest of the blog over to Kurt!
Palladium Chamber Players present The Mile-End Trio, Wednesday, May 9
By Kurt Loft
Years ago, I attended a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 at Carnegie Hall. True to its name as the Symphony of a Thousand, an enormous orchestra and chorus filled the stage and squeezed every ounce of air from the room. Walking down West 57th Street after the concert, I was drained.
This is what I call a big-ticket item in classical music, right up there with a four-hour Wagner opera, Messiaen’s 10-movement Turangalîla Symphony, or an outdoor 1812 Overture with ear-splitting cannon salvos.
The colossal works command attention because they resonate with so much force. Chamber music, on the other hand, takes us on an intimate, more inward journey and whispers rather than shouts. With one player to a part, nobody can hide: every note is exposed, every error obvious, every tune personal enough to embrace.
Such is the beauty ─ and challenge ─ of the trio. How three instruments can express so much with so little is, of course, the wonder of the genre. The piano’s seven-octave range is an orchestra in itself; the violin spins arias with its soprano voice; and the cello’s earthy richness anchors the team.
The Mile-End Trio revels in music for three, especially with so much repertoire at its disposal. In its latest Palladium Theater appearance, the group offers Classical, late-Romantic and early 20th-century masterpieces of different styles, textures and weight.
Pianist Marika Bournaki, violinist Jeffrey Multer, and cellist Julian Schwarz open with Franz Joseph Haydn’s Piano Trio No. 27 in A-Flat Major, composed in 1790 when the piano had supplanted the harpsichord as the keyboard of choice. By this time Haydn wasn’t crafting so much as perfecting forms such as the trio, symphony and string quartet ─ the scaffolding on which Mozart and Beethoven built their musical dynasties.
They certainly admired the logic and consistent quality of Haydn’s vast outlay of music. His published compositions in the three-volume Hoboken thematic catalogue include 160 trios (for both baryton and piano), 104 symphonies, nearly 70 string quartets, 50 keyboard sonatas, 20 concertos, 15 operas, 12 masses, and numerous vocal works.
The trio served as a musical laboratory for Haydn, and while many are forgotten, his mature works are admired for their clarity and architecture. Cast in a key rarely seen in Haydn, the A-Flat Major Trio might be described as effervescent, as each phrase seems so light as to defy gravity. Its three movements ─ allegro, adagio, rondo ─ unfold in the gallant style of the time, with short, song-like piano melodies evenly balanced over light accompaniment by the strings.
This is hardly the case with the Trio No. 3 in C Minor by Johannes Brahms, which contains “some of the most romantically expressive, anguished music of Brahms’s maturity,’’ writes Jan Swafford in his 1997 biography on Brahms. The music is compact and intense, with a flurry of changing time signatures, as if the composer tried to cram an hour of music into 30 minutes. An acquaintance of Brahms told him that this music “is better than any photograph, for it shows your real self.’’
The first movement carries emotional turbulence all the way through. The scherzo continues the feeling of unrest, and only in the tender slow movement do listeners find relief. As Beethoven did with his famous Fifth Symphony in the same key, Brahms begins the final movement in C minor before closing the work in the sunny key of C major.
Maurice Ravel’s Trio in A Minor, written at the onset of World War I, leaves Haydn and Brahms as we enter a modern sound world. The Trio is universally regarded as one of the masterpieces of 20th century chamber music and requires steely virtuosity from all three players.
Ravel’s musical tastes were somewhat conservative; he preferred traditional form and structure when much of the world around him was genuflecting over Wagner or rioting in the streets over Stravinsky. It was Stravinsky, in fact, who referred to Ravel as “a Swiss clockmaker,” perhaps a backhanded compliment on his attention to detail and technical brilliance.
Ravel composed the four-movement Trio slowly, even painfully, saying at the time that “I find myself sobbing over my sharps and flats.’’ He borrows a Basque folk tune for the opening movement, draws on an Indonesian poetic form ─ the pantun ─ for the second section, the follows with an old Baroque passacaglia that leads without a break into a dazzling finale. Listeners familiar with Ravel’s music might hear echoes of two other of his works here, Daphnis et Chloe and the String Quartet.
For tickets and information call our box office at 727-822-3590 or follow this link for on-line tickets and info.
Leave a Reply