Transfigured Night at the National Museum of Asian Art; Musicians from Marlboro bring chamber music magic to DC
In my past life as a classical pianist, chamber music was my first true love. It wasn’t until I went to college that I discovered there was indeed an antidote to the isolation of an open score, a cold keyboard, and a lukewarm coffee in a windowless practice room. I was allowed and even encouraged to form musical alliances with friends. To experience the highs and lows of performance together. To agree, disagree, and compromise with others in coachings. Caffeinate together before rehearsal, lose track of time, then unwind after the show at a local pub. What happens when you apply all of this camaraderie to some of the most inspired and personal works written by the composers we’ve gotten to know primarily through the symphonic idiom? There is magic in chamber music. The inexorable momentum and spontaneity captured by Musicians from Marlboro in their third and final concert of the season at the National Museum of Asian Art on Thursday night represented the highest level of artistry within this intimate medium.
These days, chamber concert lineups often feel like concoctions sprung from the hive mind of high society: former violin child prodigy + cellist/model + piano competition winner du jour = #CLASSICALSUPERGROUP. From the first notes played, it was clear that Musicians from Marlboro would keep us at the edge of our seats with their commitment to the spirit of the music, not by way of any soloistic pageantry. Cellist Chase Park set the scene for Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Five Fantasiestücke, Op. 5 with the foreboding open fifth that ushers in the Prelude. The title Fantasiestücke draws obvious comparison to forms favored by Robert Schumann, while the musical language shows strong influence of Brahms and Dvořák. A British composer of mixed race, Coleridge-Taylor was mentored by Elgar before traveling to the United States, where he learned about his own family lineage and discovered African-American spirituals.
In the three selected Fantasiestücke, violinist Stephanie Zyzak lead with conviction through dense contrapuntal passages. Zyzak’s uniquely powerful tone and natural sense of long phrasing enabled the quartet to communicate a cohesive narrative arch. The group delivered satisfying contrast in the Humoresque, aerating the music with unified detaché collé bow strokes. Particularly well-executed was the unnerving accelerando that hurtles the Humoresque to the double bar line. The last movement, Dance, possesses the same ear-worminess (and key signature) of Dvořák‘s Piano Trio No. 4. Violinist Anna Göckel helped along one of the piece’s weaker moments, the fugato section, by bringing out the fugue subject’s playful rhythmic character.
The most compelling musicianship of the night came from pianist Evren Ozel, who did not miss an opportunity to take risks and draw unusual timbres out of the instrument during Dvořák’s Bohemian kaleidoscope of a piano trio, the Op. 90 in E minor (popularly known as the “Dumky”). Meyer Auditorium is a sonically challenging space for piano and strings; the hall gives the string instruments an attractive amount of ring while maintaining speech-like immediacy, whereas the piano seems almost amplified against the back wall on the shallow stage. Rather than try to match the hyper-articulation of the string players, Ozel took advantage of the Steinway’s resonance by contrasting passionate hammer-heavy outbursts with hammerless chorale textures. Cellist Christoph Richter emphasized the plaintive quality of the theme from the fourth movement (Andante moderato), expressing subtle pangs of emotion with each iteration, just as the psyche of a character comes into focus alongside the plot of a great story. Göckel guided the audience through Dvořák‘s obscene amount of tempo changes with great clarity. To me, the final dumka is shamelessly rustic, but the group played with reckless abandon to get the job done.
Webern Op. 9 autograph manuscript (1913)
It was around the beginning of the second half of the program that I became distracted by the lack of program notes. Audience members of all backgrounds deserve to have translations of foreign musical terms, at the very least. And, for the love of Schoenberg, if you’re going to program Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), please provide text and translation of the Dehmel poem upon which the piece is programmatically based.
The two selections from Webern and Schoenberg that comprised the latter half of the concert provided snapshots of the respective composers at very different stages of their careers. In Six Bagatelles, Op. 9, Webern exercises poetic restraint and economy of gesture. Violist Hsin-Yun Huang’s dark blue tone and audible exhalations created a menacing atmosphere in the first vignette. Zyzak and Park drew inhuman sounds from their instruments in the fourth movement (Sehr langsam/Very slow), evoking Poe-esque levels of foreboding. Most impressive was the group’s command of Webern’s complex musical vocabulary. Despite the sudden stylistic shift from the Coleridge-Taylor and Dvořák, each player’s body language remained consistent, while their vast range of expression did the heavy lifting.
Translated by Stanley Appelbaum
Verklärte Nacht is considered to be Schoenberg’s most important early work. Schoenberg based the piece’s five sections on the five stanzas of Richard Dehmel’s poem of the same name. Viennese audiences were made uncomfortable by the musical narrative’s PG-13 content, but Dehmel was notoriously impressed by Schoenberg’s compositional rendering. For the first time in the program, I felt that the group did not rise to the occasion of the subversive energy of the piece. Perhaps it would have helped to have the poem to follow along with. Or maybe it was the never-ending cascade of Wagnerian climaxes and false endings that lost me. Nevertheless, there were two highlights that stuck with me long after the final sounds dissolved into the hall; Richter’s impeccable musical intonation and a lively dialogue in which Zyzak climbed effortlessly up and down the G string to match the timbre of Huang’s viola.
I look forward to catching Musicians from Marlboro the next time they pass through DC. And I hope that as performers, presenters, and journalists supporting independent music-making, we continue to explore ways to bring audiences closer to the craft. With utmost appreciation for these artists who are generous enough to share a thaum of chamber music magic with the rest of us.
