At Winter Chamber Music Festival, Britten and Reich Mingle with Beethoven
The Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Winter Festival opened last Friday with an expanded schedule, two weekends of concerts instead of the previous one — it continues January 24 though 26. It also begins to show the stamp of James Ehnes in his second year as artistic director. Saturday night’s concert included familiar composers Beethoven and Schumann, but also the first of three works celebrating the centenary of Benjamin Britten, and a work by Steve Reich.
Nearly two decades ago, then-artistic director Toby Saks attempted to broaden programming from a menu of familiar classics, and the audience that summer stayed away in droves. After that she began cautiously to include a less-familiar composer here and there, usually with a little paragraph up front describing how appealing it was and easy to take in. Gradually the programming has become more adventurous, and it’s good to see Ehnes stretching the boundaries even further.
By far the most fascinating work on Saturday’s program was Reich’s Different Trains, for string quartet and tape. Played by Ehnes and Emily Daggett Smith, violins; Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, viola; and Jeremy Turner, cello (the last two both newcomers to the festival); it has Reich’s minimalist hallmarks. These fit the premise of the work, which describes in three sections the sound of trains in America before WWII, in Europe during WWII, and after the war. The taped music is played by another quartet, the Smith (a British group), with spoken snatches from various people.
The words were hard to hear during the performance, and though the audience had them in the program, the lights were too low to be able to follow. At times, the live musicians, mostly cello or viola, played in exact cadence and rhythm with the spoken words on tape, and at the same pitch as those words, an extraordinarily difficult thing to do without being able to see the speaker and gauge the exact moment of speech. It must have taken a considerable amount of rehearsal as both players were perfectly in synch with the words.
The musical interpretation of American trains at the start sounds cheerful and organized, subtly changing to a more disorganized, more cacophonous, more worrisome sound of the trains in Europe, complete with sirens. From the words, they are clearly the trains going to concentration camps. And then the last section in a major key, cheerful, repetitive, almost dittylike. Absorbing to hear, the whole was a tour de force on the part of the musicians.
Preceding that and a complete contrast came Beethoven’s Sonata for Cello and Piano in A Major, in a moving performance played with feeling and grace by cellist Julie Albers and pianist Jeewon Park. Albers draws a warm, floating tone from her cello and played with serenity where indicated and with excitement and swift fingers in the allegros.
Britten wrote his Elegy for Solo Viola at the age of 16, as a high school student who did not fit in. English school boys could be ruthless to anyone who didn’t conform, and Britten did not. He doesn’t say who his Elegy is for, but it’s a lonely-sounding work. Britten was a violist which may account for his choice for instrument, but the content of the work was unusual for a teen in 1929, atonal, not at all melodic, and without recognizable phrasing, at least at first hearing. He had been exposed to Bartok and Schoemberg by his composition teacher for five years, Frank Bridge.
A violist with a big sound, Toby Appel performed it sensitively on Saturday. He also joined pianist Max Levinson for Schumann’s Maerchenbilder (Fairytale Pictures). Though their ensemble work was excellent, Appel’s playing while warm and rich often was not as clean as it could be and occasionally a hair off pitch.
