Cover image: Gilles Vonsattel, piano
We are reaching the end of Emerald City Music’s second season, a venture a bit different from most chamber music series, in that they take place, in Seattle at any rate, in the back room of a coffee house in South Lake Union, and don’t start until 8 p.m. more or less—the timing is a bit fluid. Patrons have a chance to pick up a drink, included with the ticket price, and wander round talking to musicians and each other before settling in to hear the music. It’s comfortably casual, no one dresses up, and there are only about one in ten grey or white heads in the audience, rare for any classical concert. And that’s the point.
The young artistic director, Avery Fisher Career Grant winner and violinist Kristin Lee, and the equally young and equally well credentialed executive director and administrator Andrew Goldstein, aimed for the younger generation such as the Amazon millennials who throng South Lake Union, and they are winning them.
As all musicians know if you want to engage new listeners, whether they be children or adults, you need to use the best quality performers you can. How can you sell listeners on something less than first rate? Lee and Goldstein took this approach from the start, and each concert of the past two seasons has seen top rank players from across the country coming here with programs which are fresh and often unusual.
Last Friday’s concert, “In Blue…” paid honor to the influence of blues and jazz on composers from the 1920s on. Written programs for ECM’s concerts are nonexistent, just a list of the works though often not played in that order plus brief biographies of the musicians, though the musicians themselves talk a little about the music they are about to play.
Kristin Lee, violin; Mark Dover, clarinet; and Jeewon Park, piano (Photo: ECM/Carlin Ma)
More written information would often be enlightening: for instance, Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, initially for seven instruments plus a narrator and a dancer, was performed Friday as a Suite with just clarinet, violin and piano. Stravinsky himself made the arrangement in 1919 which is amazingly successful in that it is almost impossible to feel the lack of the percussion, the brass, the speaker and dancer in the original version of 1918 (though no one is completely sure which came first).
Friday, it was performed by violinist Lee, clarinetist Mark Dover, and pianist Jeewon Park, and the whole was as arresting, as lively, as seemingly percussive, vigorous, discordant, jazzy and disjointed as the original, and the trio performed perfectly together except one short section where Lee and Park seemed not to be quite in accord.
New to most of the audience would have been Frederic Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues for piano solo from 1978-79, an extraordinary evocation of the continuous and invasive sound of the cotton gins rumbling in the lowest registers. while slow blues chords could be heard higher, slow, sinuous, sensuous. Gilles Vonsattel played this virtuosic work, leaving an indelible feel of the factory floor.
Lee and Vonsattel’s beautifully synchronized performance of the Ravel Sonata No. 2 was a pleasure with its nuances and dynamic changes, its tonal warmth, and the last movement’s “perpetuum mobile” a credit to Lee who made its warp-speed seem easy. Bernstein’s clarinet sonata is so early in his output that the composer has hardly found his signature voice yet, though it is modern, jazzy and fun, as played by Park and Dover.
Lastly, Park and Vonsattel undertook Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in the piano four-hands version, though with the heraldic entry delightfully and unexpectedly provided by the clarinet from the back of the room. Park took the upper register, Vonsattel the lower though I could have wished for it to be the other way around. Park tends to bang on the instrument, and while this work gives plenty of opportunity for loud, fast playing, more nuance would have added considerably to the pleasure.
At the end, executive director Goldstein announced next season’s programs, continuing ECM’s adventurous ideas and including some international performers.