Euro Concert Tour # 2: Brahms and Mendelssohn on the Rhine

Our third musical event of the tour was also the first to take place aboard the M/S AmaSerena, as it cruised placidly through a sunny, warm October afternoon along the broad waters of the Rhine from Düsseldorf to Köln (Cologne).

On the face of it, many musicians and music-lovers might regard the main lounge of a typical river cruise ship as a somewhat unfavourable environment for classical chamber music.  In fact, the results were better than I had expected or even hoped.  The broad space, low flat ceiling, and abundance of plushy armchairs and sofas all balanced each other off nicely to give a clear, but not harsh, overall sound with the further advantage of suppressing the percussive edge which can sometimes allow a piano to overwhelm the other instruments in a chamber ensemble.

And since much chamber music was written for performance in private homes, be they aristocratic palaces or just middle-class sitting rooms, the environment is actually much closer to a true chamber setting than any concert hall, no matter how fine its acoustic may be.

This first on-board concert, then, featured the combined musicianship of clarinetist James Campbell and the Gryphon Trio, all ranked among Canada's foremost chamber musicians and all artists with international reputations.

Jim Campbell began the performance by asking the audience a question: "What would it take to make you come out of retirement?"  His question, of course, was a leading reference to Johannes Brahms, who had retired definitively from composing -- until he heard the clarinet playing of Richard Mühlfeld, and proceeded to compose a whole string of autumnal masterpieces including three significant chamber works for clarinet.  It was the first of the three, the Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano in A Minor, Op. 114, which we heard today.  Some of the Great Experts declare that this is a relatively weak composition, but for me it has always been a personal favourite among the three Brahms chamber works for clarinet.  Unusually, Brahms called for a clarinet in A (rather than the more common B-flat instrument) and, in his desire to showcase the instrument and player, incorporated a low C sharp, which cannot be played on a B-flat clarinet.

From the opening bars, it was plain that the music was in secure hands.  Cellist Roman Borys and pianist Jamie Parker joined Campbell in a performance which respected the intimacy of the music while still finding many nuances of light and shade in all the movements.  Particularly admirable in this reading was the interplay between the clarinet and cello, the rare combination of instruments which gives this trio its uniquely warm, rich sound.  The  ensemble's playing in the third movement particularly heeded the composer's direction grazioso.  The finale achieved lively results right up to the end while still remaining intimate in scale.  While recognizing, as all artists do, that you are only as good as your next performance, it's still valid to say that the excellence of the work from these musicians can safely be taken for granted.

The second major work was the Piano Trio No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 66, by Felix Mendelssohn.  This piece was composed in 1845, when Mendelssohn was at the full height of his powers as a composer.  Like its companion Trio No. 1 of five years earlier, this four-movement work encompasses worlds of drama, pathos, and fantasy, yet never forgets its chamber-music heritage and only briefly seems (at one or two points) like a symphony struggling to get out and breathe.  That's a notable balancing act.

I'm always intrigued by Mendelssohn's compositional style in which a clear melodic line is accompanied by endless scales or ostinati reinforcing the harmonic progress of that melody.  What amuses me is the way that, in his symphonic writing, the melody is usually entrusted to the winds or brasses while the violins get to turn endless somersaults with the sixteenth-note figures -- while, in his chamber music, the strings as often get to  carry the melodic line while the poor pianist has to play eight times as many notes in the form of scales and arpeggios ad infinitum!  Certainly, there are a number of passages in this trio that reinforce the point.

There's something special about a performance such as the one the Gryphon Trio gave today.  Here, you have a group of musicians who have worked closely together for many years, and who now perform almost as if they were a single living organism.  And yet, there is no suspicion of routine at all about the performance -- rather, a powerful sense that each note, phrase, or movement is being discovered anew throughout.  That never-failing feeling of new discovery is the keynote of every Gryphon Trio performance.

So, today, the drama of the first movement built up through a series of waves of rising and falling excitement to the positively hair-raising coda.  The second movement was played with just as much sense of dramatic building and resolving of tension, despite the slower tempo.  The scherzo, yet another of Mendelssohn's incredible gossamer-light inspirations, flew by in a whirlwind of quiet sound, with every note still clearly and distinctly audible (this is one spot where a bigger, more resonant hall might work to the audience's disadvantage).  

Then the finale brings one of Mendelssohn's unique inspirations, a central episode incorporating a Lutheran chorale, played first with quiet majesty by the piano and then repeated by violin and cello with ineffable lyrical beauty.  Then, in the coda, the chorale returns with some piano writing so emphatic and so bass-heavy that for a moment Mendelssohn sounds more like Liszt.  And it was here, and here only, that the piano momentarily overwhelmed the strings -- but that is an obvious built-in hazard of the score.  The string reprise was as lovely as before, even with the heavier piano underscoring.  And the Gryphons then drove the final bars to a conclusion of furious energy.

A very rewarding first performance of the week from our resident artists on this tour!