Music Chronicle

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2004 by Dhuga, U S

INTENT AS EVER ON AVOIDING THE PREDICTABLE PROGRAMMING which Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center inevitably present us at each season's start, I began autumn of 2003 seeking out performances of marked ingenuity. If ever you find yourself on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-second Street, do make a point of taking a quick look around the Austrian Cultural Forum, where the concert hall, despite (or perhaps because of) its bare pinewood construction, is, to my ear, one of the finest places in New York to hear chamber music. Not for the ACF the sumptuous interior of the Frick; but the shorter queues at the former make the starkness of the space more palatable.

The Haydn Trio Eisenstadt (named in honor of Haydn's birthplace) commenced the ACF's inaugural season on 19 September with an intelligent program, following upon Haydn's Piano Trio in E flat major (Hob. XV/29) with composers born no less than two hundred years after Haydn-Tibor Nemeth (b. 1961, Brixlegg, Austria) and Ivan Erod (b. 1936, Budapest), both former Viennese students whose works are as sadly underperformed outside of Europe as are those of their precursors, Bartok and Kodaly. Such is the Eisenstadt's refreshingly catholic taste for Viennese schools both past and present.

Violinist Verena Stourzh sauntered onstage in a blinding pink and orange scarf and black knit toque; but to my surprise her playing was quite conservative in its adherence to score. The buoyancy of the first movement was slightly exaggerated by all three musicians: the allegretto indication does, after all, bear the qualification poco. Pianist Harald Kosik, lanky, slouching, but with formidable presence-imagine, if you can, a thin, bashful Sviatoslav Richter-enunciated remarkably well while pedalling adeptly if rather liberally. This was Haydn as he should be played, with both sprightliness and patient attendance to his characteristically protean tempi, the transitions among which continue to move one no matter how often they have been heard. Benjamin Britten nicely characterized Haydn as "a rich and often strange figure." The Eisenstadt possessed the vigor to bring out at once both that richness and that strangeness.

Throughout Nemeth's "Trio di Centenario," dedicated to Jeno Takacs for his 100th birthday, wonderful intimations of Bartok were apparent; but the piano's confinement to blocked chords and unvaried, repetitive trills quickly became predictable and, frankly, boring. Erod's Piano Trio No. 1 was more successful, presenting a beautiful dialogue between violin and cello, mediated by piano notes whose restrained tenderness brought to mind the First of Shostakovich's 24 Preludes and Fugues.

My memories of (again) Britten's well-tempered expressiveness, both verbal and musical, drew me to the irresistible opening night of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, featuring Tchaikovsky's "Serenade for Strings" in C major, Op. 48, for which I have always had an unflagging Romantic weakness. The Society's artistic director, David Shifrin, rather paradoxically introduced the musicians as a "chamber orchestra"; nonetheless, the results justified the rather loose application of the word "chamber." Britten's interpretation of Tchaikovsky's "Serenade"-an improbable pairing, to be sure-with the English Chamber Orchestra at Snape Makings on 16 June 1968 stands, in my mind, as the finest interpretation of the piece among modern composers,1 combining Tchaikovsky's emotionalism with Britten's characteristic restraint. Memories of Britten notwithstanding, it was a wonderful and rare experience to hear the "Serenade" in such an intimate space as Alice Tully Hall, in which the clarity and distinctiveness of each string section was brought to the fore-no mean task as regards a piece which can tend towards soupiness in larger concert spaces. The breathtaking silences which punctuate the theme were beautifully observed and lingered upon, making each swelling of the strings so much more meaningful.

In a shift away from the strictly canonical, I turned to the Moritzburg Festival at Carnegie's Weill Recital Hall on 20 September, specifically to attend the North American premiere of Thomas Ades' "Piano Quintet." Ades, born in 1971, released his debut recording, Living Toys, in 1998, consisting of music composed between 1993 and 1994.2 Little known this side of the Atlantic, Ades looms large in England, as testified in part by a large, vibrant portrait recently installed at London's National Portrait Gallery. Painter Philip Oliver Hale depicts the composer in Ades' London home reclining-at once elegantly refined and unaffectedly insouciant-on an armchair with his feet resting upon an ottoman. (If you are not in London, it is well worth the time to look up Hale's 2002 portrait of Ades on the National Portrait Gallery's website.3) The portrait reflects perfectly Ades' own artistic sensibility: his music is a conversation between the classical and the unconventional: he is unafraid simultaneously to repeat a Romantic exposition and to vary that exposition with instruments moving in altogether different time signatures. Written in a strict sonata form, the "Piano Quintet" was a beautiful, single movement, markedly more mature and coherent than the too often errant and disjointed movements of his earlier forays into chamber music, namely the quartet "Arcadiana, Op. 12" (1994) and the "Sonata da Caccia, Op. 11" (1993). Ades' "Piano Quintet" is clearly a difficult piece to perform (and a difficult piece to listen to, but one well worth the effort), demanding of the musicians not a little stamina to sustain the consistent melody throughout its subtle transformations. But French pianist Louis Lortie-though prone to embarrassingly histrionic hand gestures and distractingly grotesque facial distortions-provided an experienced, reliable center of balance for violinists James Ehnes and Mira Wang.