CONCERTS

Your monthly critical round-up of performances, recordings and publications

Expressive Dvořák and Schubert from the Calidore Quartet

CALIDORE QUARTET

SHRIVER CONCERT HALL, BALTIMORE, MD, 2 MAY 2021

The Calidore Quartet’s bold interpretation of Dvořák’s ‘American’ Quartet was entirely absorbing, even on a screen. Jeffrey Myers’ warm sound led the quartet well, and I especially appreciated the tenderness with which he often played –a lovely contrast to the energy in the more aggressive sections. The Lento was not overly slow or nostalgic, but played quite elegantly; the cello solo by Estelle Choi was a standout. The Molto vivace was taken at a moderate tempo, stately and elegant, full of character and charm.

The streaming world premiere of Hannah Lash’s Quartet no.1 followed the Dvořák and was performed with commitment and a strong sense of overall architecture. The first movement was minimalist with the repetition of a fluttery threenote motif throughout, while the second movement featured harsh open-5th double-stops interspersed with flightly ponticello lines which mirrored the driving rhythmic patterns of the double-stops.

The third movement opened with a sophisticated and deeply felt first violin solo played over pizzicato in the lower strings. The movement takes us by surprise when just at the climax, after all instruments have joined in the melody, the upper three return abruptly to pizzicato and the cellist begins to sing

(an incredible text written by Lash). The soulful final movement ended the quartet with passion and deep expressivity.

Schubert’s great G major Quartet was delightfully performed, filled with colour, contrasts and deep emotion. The texture of the opening was clear and the character contrastingly playful or serious. The drama of the work was wonderfully brought to life and listening to this masterpiece performed so sensitively and powerfully by the Calidores was a deeply fulfilling experience.

LEAH HOLLINGSWORTH

AUGUSTIN HADELICH (VIOLIN)

ATTERBURY HOUSE, NEW YORK, NY, 15 MAY 2021

In two short works, Augustin Hadelich (right) adroitly demonstrated that Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932–2004) can hold his own among two giants who also composed for strings. For the three movements of Blue/s Forms (1979), Hadelich offered expertly calibrated doublestopped jazz melismas, buoyed with precisely judged intonation. And in Louisiana Blues Strut from 2002, the violinist continued his idiomatic mood, combining seeming casualness with incendiary virtuosity.

Hadelich finds more substance in Paganini than many of his peers. In the Ninth Caprice, intonation and skittering spiccatos were pillars of the violinist’s precision approach. Yes, the fireworks were present, but the explosions seemed the results of careful thought and planning. (Meanwhile, a shout-out to sound engineer Laura de Rover, whose discreet expertise enhanced the entire recital.)

To close came Bach’s Second Partita, after Hadelich switched to a Baroque bow. If the Sarabanda was perhaps the most striking – exuding dreamy, mournful nostalgia – the Allemande and the Corrente showed the artist’s same precision delivery, and unerring flow of line. Pausing before the Giga, Hadelich seemed to contemplate his bow position carefully (violinists everywhere, take note), before delivering the intricate movement with similar limpid fluidity. And then came the Chaconne, steeped in history, here showing its timelessness.

With careful attention to contrast and dynamics, Hadelich grew in intensity to the end, with explosive emotions previously held in check. All served to highlight the final note, given a discreet decrescendo to silence.

BRUCE HODGES

JUNCTION TRIO

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN HALL, PHILADELPHIA, PA, 20 MAY 2021

With pianist Conrad Tao strumming inside the piano, John Zorn’s Ghosts (2015) opened an absorbing evening with the Junction Trio at Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Hall. Soon violinist Stefan Jackiw and cellist Jay Campbell joined in with a nervous accelerando, swooping in with shrieks and eerie glissandos. A direct quotation from the opening bars of Beethoven’s ‘Ghost’ Trio makes an appearance before an angular burst of energy brings the work to an abrupt close.

Before Charles Ives’ Piano Trio, Jackiw offered an articulate introduction on the composer’s inspiration, a joyful clashing of bands from his youth, resulting in sequences with wildly divergent tempos and keys. The first movement bore this out, as if hearing two different works simultaneously.

But what a pleasure to hear the intricate collisions of the second movement, ‘TSIAJ’ (‘This scherzo is a joke’), done with such spirit and aplomb. In the YouTube chat during the concert, someone mentioned Bartók, but this was like Bartók on steroids. American folk songs and hymns appeared and vanished like phantoms, and the final two-note gesture was ideally dispatched.

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HADELICH PHOTO LARA ST JOHN. JUNCTION TRIO PHOTO SHERVIN LAINEZ

In the finale, tenderness counterbalanced the jarring previous movement. Done with Straussian elegance and refinement, Jackiw and Campbell showed keen attention to legato at times, and barbaric lunges at others. By the time the ending arrived, with fragments of ‘Rock of Ages’ caressing the ear, there likely wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

BRUCE HODGES

Playing of elegance and refinement from the Junction Trio

JASPER QUARTET, SARAH SHAFER (SOPRANO)

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN HALL, PHILADELPHIA, PA, 26 MAY 2021

The Quartet no.1 (2001) by Vivian Fung (b.1975) opened a programme of works by five North American female composers. It was highly colourful and a pleasing combination of the usual four movements. It profited from the impressive ensemble, tonal suavity and instrumental balance of the Jaspers, formed in 2003 and a feature of Philadelphia’s musical life since 2016.

Dust by Keiko Devaux (b.1982) seemed an amorphous, evanescent collection of sounds which included fragmentary allusions to the ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’ of Beethoven’s Quartet op.32. The mood was suitably meditative but veered close to soporific. Middleground (2016) by Shelley Washington (b.1981), more rhythmic in character, seemed about to break into a dance but never quite found its way. A contrapuntal episode preceded a return to the almost-a-reel of the conclusion.

The Jasper Quartet celebrates US women composers

MARTHA HOLLAND

‘Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown?’ and ‘I’ll Fly Away’ are bluegrass Gospel classics. Their vitality and simple emotion were not qualities of the abstracted and highly stylised settings by Caroline Shaw (b.1982) in which the Jaspers were joined by soprano Sarah Shafer. In the Shadow of Sirius by Jennifer Higdon (b.1962), a cycle of five poems by W.S. Merwin from a larger collection of the same name, the musical idiom was derivative but assured; however, a simple reading of the poems produces a music superior to any in the setting. Shaffer and the Jaspers were efficient if not altogether persuasive advocates for both works.

DENNIS ROONEY

YEVGENY KUTIK (VIOLIN) BOSTON CIVIC SYMPHONY/FRANCISCO NOYA

FIRST CHURCH IN CAMBRIDGE, MA, 13 JUNE 2021

Founded in 1924 as the Civic Symphony of Boston (its name was changed this year to the Boston Civic Symphony), this is the city’s second oldest orchestra. This concert originated in First Church in Cambridge, a historic structure located near Harvard University. A socially distanced audience heard a similarly distanced orchestra, all wearing masks, perform a programme under Venezuelanborn music director Francisco Noya, now in his fourth season in that post.

Lyric for Strings, a 1946 work by American composer George Walker (1922–2018), was written in tribute to his grandmother and later incorporated into his String Quartet no.1. It is a short, elegiac movement that suggests acquaintance with Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. But Walker’s lament is less histrionic in character, with contrasting lighter material. It was creditably performed. Respighi’s Gli uccelli followed, played more slowly than usual.

Yevgeny Kutik, born in Minsk and currently a Boston resident, studied with Roman Totenberg and Donald Weilerstein and has degrees from Boston University and the New England Conservatory.

In Beethoven’s Violin Concerto he produced a cultivated sound on a 1915 instrument by Stefano Scarampella. As a performance, however, it seemed an interpretation still in progress, with elements of virtuosity, tonal brilliance, eloquence, rhythmic articulation, and direct musical expression yet to coalesce successfully. The socially distant placement of the orchestra worked against crisp ensemble.

DENNIS ROONEY

Live streams: UK

NICOLA BENEDETTI (VIOLIN) LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/ GIANANDREA NOSEDA

LSO ST LUKE’S, LONDON, 29 APRIL 2021

‘Everything has been poured into it’, says Nicola Benedetti of Mark Simpson’s Violin Concerto.

In his own introduction to this studio concert the composer talks promisingly of aB flat minor Lamentoso beginning which makes Gianandrea Noseda’s no-holds-barred direction of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Pathétique’ Symphony a well-chosen foil. But back to the concerto, and what a piece it is: immediately arresting from the wire-brushed gong and bluesy trumpets punctuating a soaring solo cantilena, harmonically legible and charged with passion.

In 35 minutes and five movements, in a shrewdly plotted continuous whole, Simpson renews rather than rejects the tropes of the Romantic concerto from Mendelssohn to Shostakovich. The tensions of the solo writing sometimes find their release in rather obvious moments and brass writing out of the Korngold-to-Desplat cinematic playbook, and the alternating episodes of communing recitative and furious dance in the second and fifth movements withhold resolution longer than feels inevitable.

However, they counterbalance the interrupted love song at the concerto’s heart, and Benedetti’s playing holds the structure together with fierce conviction.

Her qualities as an exceptional Szymanowski violinist – fantasy, French-accented tone and fleet negotiation of cross-string fireworks – are celebrated by Simpson’s writing, but I fancy other modern virtuosos will be queueing up to place their own stamp on a concerto that has every ingredient for popular success and a place in the repertoire.

PETER QUANTRILL

Benedetti, Noseda and the LSO premiere Mark Simpson’s Violin Concerto

COURTESY LSO

RACHEL PODGER (VIOLIN)

ST MARTIN-IN-THE-FIELDS, LONDON, 21 MAY 2021

Rachel Podger recently arranged and recorded all of Bach’s Cello Suites, and she opened here with the Second, transposed from D minor into A minor. She has the gift, which she demonstrated repeatedly in this concert, of elucidating shape, expression and structural clarity while appearing to do very little: just some dynamic shading here, a touch of judicious rubato there. The opening Prelude was eloquent and full of detail, and the Allemande and Courante were airy and dancing; the Sarabande was serene and reflective, and the two Menuets and Gigue were sprightly and flecked with ornament.

In the opening Andante of Tartini’s B minor Sonata Piccola, Podger maintained a singing narrative line through the complexities of both Tartini’s writing and her own inventive ornamentation; she skipped through the angular leaps and double stopping of the Allegro Assai and gave the final Giga the feel of an improvisation. In Biber’s Passacaglia she demonstrated the immense authority of one who knows the work inside out, revealing it in all its many colours, its intimacies and its touches of playfulness. She ended with Bach once more, her own transcription of his A minor Flute Partita BWV1013 (taken down a tone), as beautiful and satisfying as all that had gone before.

TIM HOMFRAY

RAUTIO PIANO TRIO

KINGS PLACE 30 MAY 2021

There must have been many a delayed premiere in the last year or so. Brian Elias’s Piano Trio was due several months back, but didn’t make it before an audience until the end of May. It is a work in five linked movements, with Haydn, says the composer, an inspiration in the background. The opening Allegro is a ‘call to attention’, with fervent, rhetorical strings to the fore, which darkens before leading into a Lento, the first of two slow movements, with long weaving melodies, which drew sustained lyrical playing even as the lines swooped and dipped, with curlicues of ornament and occasional doublestopping. There was great tonal intensity in the (I think) trio of the central Presto, and it was all rounded off with a second Presto. This is an energetic and entertaining work with a wide emotional range, which brought fine playing from the Rautio Trio.

In Schubert’s E flat major Trio they were forthright and exuberant, with springing rhythms in the first movement. In the opening of the Andante, cellist Victoria Simonsen was both simple and wonderfully expressive, and they carried the narrative line through the long movement with expressive intensity. There was charm in the Scherzo, and the final Allegro Moderato emerged from dignified dance into energetic drama.

TIM HOMFRAY