For those on the tour who are following this series, I apologize for not including a review of the Zurich Ballet. I was just too tired out to go racing out the door again on Sunday night. I was asleep in bed before the show was even half over.
The grand finale of our European concert tour came on Monday night at the historic St. Peter's Church in central Zurich. For this performance, the Gryphon Trio and James Campbell were joined by the Swiss Piano Trio and two additional musicians, Ruth Killius (viola) and Kenneth Henderson (horn). The concert was billed as a "Three Festivals Concert," because it featured the anchoring musicians of three music festivals: Festival Kammermusik Bodensee (the Swiss Piano Trio), Ottawa Chamberfest (the Gryphon Trio), and Festival of the Sound (James Campbell).
The choice of venue was significant. I dearly love all three works on the programme, but I have never heard any of them played in such a resonant venue with such a lengthy echo time. The church is a sizable (although not huge) building with a Romanesque barrel roof. The interior walls and ceiling are faced with acres of paint over either plaster or stone. The floor is all stone. The musicians play on the rostrum where the elders would sit at service, also a stone floor. The fronts of the balconies around three sides are faced with wood, but there are almost no other sound absorbers in the building at all.
This tricky acoustic had two effects on the balance of the music. It tended to damp down the string tone, while amplifying the percussive edge of the piano by a quantum factor. It couldn't possibly have been a greater contrast from the plush, low-resonance lounge of the M/S AmaSerena where previous concerts took place. It was notable that the Gryphon Trio's pianist, Jamie Parker, was leaning into the piano part much as he would have done on the ship -- and there, it was necessary. In this church, though, his piano playing sometimes swamped the strings. By contrast, the Swiss Piano Trio's pianist, Martin Lucas Staub, who has often performed in this church, is plainly used to the environment and didn't work the piano nearly as forcefully.
In pointing this out, I need to qualify by saying that the world's greatest artists would be apt to run into similar problems, playing chamber music in such an unfamiliar and resonant environment. My own amateur estimate is that the echo time is somewhere upwards of a second -- which means that, in loud percussive sections, it's quite possible to distinctly hear each separate note twice.
But it also means that rapid passagework in the strings is apt to become blurry, with runs sounding more like slides or portamenti. Definitely a challenge to adapt on such limited rehearsal time.
So with that overall caveat, here are my reactions to the programme.
Mozart: Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, K.581
Angela Golubeva, violin; Ruth Killius, viola; James Campbell, clarinet; Jamie Parker, piano.
A delightful performance of this mature Mozart inspiration. In the faster movements, especially the briskly-played minuet, the passagework for the upper strings was blurred by the resonance. The tonal beauty of the slow passages in the second movement, in the first trio of the minuet, and above all in the heartfelt slow variation in the finale was a total joy to the ear. The air of playfulness in the clarinet part in both the minuet and the theme of the finale brought a smile to my face, and I'm sure to many others.
Schumann: Quintet for Piano and String Quartet, Op. 44
The Gryphon Trio (Annalee Patipatanakoon, violin; Roman Borys, cello; Jamie Parker, piano) with Angela Golubeva, violin; Ruth Killius, viola.
This quintet always strikes me as a bit of a paradox. It's acclaimed, with good reason, as one of the great masterpieces of the Romantic chamber music repertoire, yet it contains sections which seem to me embarrassingly naive, notably the slow movement and the finale -- both of which depend to a dangerous extent on endless repetitions of a single short melodic fragment.
I know that not everyone will agree with me, and that's fine. At dinner before the concert, I listened to another gentleman at our table loudly acclaiming the Schumann Quintet as the greatest piece of chamber music ever composed. I held my peace. If I were forced to make such a selection, I would personally opt for either Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 131 or Brahms' Piano Quintet, Op. 34. But, for me, the "greatest" is generally whichever piece I am listening to at the moment.
It was in some of the louder pages of the first and last movements that the balance problems between piano and strings became most acute. But there were ample compensations. I simply cannot forget the gorgeous angelic halo cast over the lyrical episodes in the funeral march and scherzo -- the finest string playing of the evening. On the more dramatic side, the double fugue at the end, where the finale's theme combines with an augmented version of the opening movement, fairly stood my hair on end -- and here, the balance was impeccable.
Dohnányi: Sextet for Clarinet, Horn, Violin, Viola, Cello, and Piano, Op. 37.
The Swiss Piano Trio (Angela Golubeva, violin; Joël Marosi, cello; Martin Lucas Staub, piano) with Ruth Killius, viola; Kenneth Henderson, horn; James Campbell, clarinet.
This work was composed in 1935, almost a century after the Schumann Quintet, and it shows. Even though Dohnányi composed in what was then considered a "conservative" idiom, his harmonic practice is definitely later than Wagner. If nothing else, the truth of that statement is amply proven by the last two chords of this work -- I'm sure that ending would have made both Brahms and Wagner cringe.
In the first movement, allegro appassionato, the ensemble found much drama in the sometimes wayward writing. Most striking were the several passages where the melodic line fell by a minor second, while the bass line ominously rose by a minor third to the tonic -- the same doom-laden progression which Schoenberg used, to devastating effect, in the tragic Lied der Waldtaube from his early choral/vocal masterpiece, Gurrelieder.
Drama continued to erupt, between more lyrical passages, throughout the second movement Intermezzo (Adagio) and the third movement, Allegro con sentiment (although I've never really gotten the point of that unusual direction). But then, the music suddenly morphed into the completely different world of the finale, and the whole ensemble were plainly having the time of their lives with the upbeat, jazzy rhythms, and the endless syncopations -- mainly due to the main theme getting chopped short on almost every appearance. When it isn't being chopped, it's being lengthened. This strikes the hearer as music meant to disorient, and the players relished the fun of disorienting their audience again and again.
The final buildup to the coda was suitably raucous and energetic without sacrificing the musicality of the playing. The never-failing joke of the false ending on the subdominant, followed immediately by an insouciant cadence to the tonic, was both neatly and dramatically executed. I don't think I've ever heard more comically underlined the words that Jim Campbell spoke to us before the work was played: "The last two notes are definitely worth waiting for." Oh, yes.
The final applause was succeeded by several short speeches of thanks to the gang of 138 who went along on this extraordinary musical adventure, a "festival on the water" in truth. We all made so many friends on this trip, some in passing, and some definitely for the longer term, and all the music was somewhere from incredible on up.
Please be aware that any criticisms I've had to level in these reviews have been in the nature of trying to find the right rating in the range of 90-99%. It's been a fantastic experience from start to finish.
The choice of venue was significant. I dearly love all three works on the programme, but I have never heard any of them played in such a resonant venue with such a lengthy echo time. The church is a sizable (although not huge) building with a Romanesque barrel roof. The interior walls and ceiling are faced with acres of paint over either plaster or stone. The floor is all stone. The musicians play on the rostrum where the elders would sit at service, also a stone floor. The fronts of the balconies around three sides are faced with wood, but there are almost no other sound absorbers in the building at all.
This tricky acoustic had two effects on the balance of the music. It tended to damp down the string tone, while amplifying the percussive edge of the piano by a quantum factor. It couldn't possibly have been a greater contrast from the plush, low-resonance lounge of the M/S AmaSerena where previous concerts took place. It was notable that the Gryphon Trio's pianist, Jamie Parker, was leaning into the piano part much as he would have done on the ship -- and there, it was necessary. In this church, though, his piano playing sometimes swamped the strings. By contrast, the Swiss Piano Trio's pianist, Martin Lucas Staub, who has often performed in this church, is plainly used to the environment and didn't work the piano nearly as forcefully.
In pointing this out, I need to qualify by saying that the world's greatest artists would be apt to run into similar problems, playing chamber music in such an unfamiliar and resonant environment. My own amateur estimate is that the echo time is somewhere upwards of a second -- which means that, in loud percussive sections, it's quite possible to distinctly hear each separate note twice.
But it also means that rapid passagework in the strings is apt to become blurry, with runs sounding more like slides or portamenti. Definitely a challenge to adapt on such limited rehearsal time.
So with that overall caveat, here are my reactions to the programme.
Mozart: Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, K.581
Angela Golubeva, violin; Ruth Killius, viola; James Campbell, clarinet; Jamie Parker, piano.
A delightful performance of this mature Mozart inspiration. In the faster movements, especially the briskly-played minuet, the passagework for the upper strings was blurred by the resonance. The tonal beauty of the slow passages in the second movement, in the first trio of the minuet, and above all in the heartfelt slow variation in the finale was a total joy to the ear. The air of playfulness in the clarinet part in both the minuet and the theme of the finale brought a smile to my face, and I'm sure to many others.
Schumann: Quintet for Piano and String Quartet, Op. 44
The Gryphon Trio (Annalee Patipatanakoon, violin; Roman Borys, cello; Jamie Parker, piano) with Angela Golubeva, violin; Ruth Killius, viola.
This quintet always strikes me as a bit of a paradox. It's acclaimed, with good reason, as one of the great masterpieces of the Romantic chamber music repertoire, yet it contains sections which seem to me embarrassingly naive, notably the slow movement and the finale -- both of which depend to a dangerous extent on endless repetitions of a single short melodic fragment.
I know that not everyone will agree with me, and that's fine. At dinner before the concert, I listened to another gentleman at our table loudly acclaiming the Schumann Quintet as the greatest piece of chamber music ever composed. I held my peace. If I were forced to make such a selection, I would personally opt for either Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 131 or Brahms' Piano Quintet, Op. 34. But, for me, the "greatest" is generally whichever piece I am listening to at the moment.
It was in some of the louder pages of the first and last movements that the balance problems between piano and strings became most acute. But there were ample compensations. I simply cannot forget the gorgeous angelic halo cast over the lyrical episodes in the funeral march and scherzo -- the finest string playing of the evening. On the more dramatic side, the double fugue at the end, where the finale's theme combines with an augmented version of the opening movement, fairly stood my hair on end -- and here, the balance was impeccable.
Dohnányi: Sextet for Clarinet, Horn, Violin, Viola, Cello, and Piano, Op. 37.
The Swiss Piano Trio (Angela Golubeva, violin; Joël Marosi, cello; Martin Lucas Staub, piano) with Ruth Killius, viola; Kenneth Henderson, horn; James Campbell, clarinet.
This work was composed in 1935, almost a century after the Schumann Quintet, and it shows. Even though Dohnányi composed in what was then considered a "conservative" idiom, his harmonic practice is definitely later than Wagner. If nothing else, the truth of that statement is amply proven by the last two chords of this work -- I'm sure that ending would have made both Brahms and Wagner cringe.
In the first movement, allegro appassionato, the ensemble found much drama in the sometimes wayward writing. Most striking were the several passages where the melodic line fell by a minor second, while the bass line ominously rose by a minor third to the tonic -- the same doom-laden progression which Schoenberg used, to devastating effect, in the tragic Lied der Waldtaube from his early choral/vocal masterpiece, Gurrelieder.
Drama continued to erupt, between more lyrical passages, throughout the second movement Intermezzo (Adagio) and the third movement, Allegro con sentiment (although I've never really gotten the point of that unusual direction). But then, the music suddenly morphed into the completely different world of the finale, and the whole ensemble were plainly having the time of their lives with the upbeat, jazzy rhythms, and the endless syncopations -- mainly due to the main theme getting chopped short on almost every appearance. When it isn't being chopped, it's being lengthened. This strikes the hearer as music meant to disorient, and the players relished the fun of disorienting their audience again and again.
The final buildup to the coda was suitably raucous and energetic without sacrificing the musicality of the playing. The never-failing joke of the false ending on the subdominant, followed immediately by an insouciant cadence to the tonic, was both neatly and dramatically executed. I don't think I've ever heard more comically underlined the words that Jim Campbell spoke to us before the work was played: "The last two notes are definitely worth waiting for." Oh, yes.
The final applause was succeeded by several short speeches of thanks to the gang of 138 who went along on this extraordinary musical adventure, a "festival on the water" in truth. We all made so many friends on this trip, some in passing, and some definitely for the longer term, and all the music was somewhere from incredible on up.
Please be aware that any criticisms I've had to level in these reviews have been in the nature of trying to find the right rating in the range of 90-99%. It's been a fantastic experience from start to finish.
Thoughtful, accurate and well written accounts of this amazing musical journey. Regarding the ballet, in my opinion you didn’t miss much.
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