REVIEW: LINCOLN CENTER CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY DOWNLOADS

posted by James Reel

If you’re enjoying our Thursday broadcasts of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, you might be interested in reviews of a couple of the organization’s downloads I wrote for Fanfare magazine:

BARTÓK Contrasts DVORÁK Piano Quintet in A, Op. 81  Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center  DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON 477 7073 (digital download only; available at www2.deutschegrammophon.com and www.iTunes.com: 58:07)

DEBUSSY AND THE MODERNS  Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center  DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON 477 6627 (digital download only; available at www2.deutschegrammophon.com and www.iTunes.com: 95:50)

DEBUSSY Sonatas: for Flute, Viola, and Harp; for Cello and Piano; for Violin and Piano STUCKY _Sonate en Forme de Preludes_ SAARIAHO _Je sens un deuxième Coeur (I Feel a Second Heart)_ DALBAVIE _Axiom_

These two early items in the DG Concerts series of downloads (not available on disc) have been available for more than a year, but they’re still worth bringing to your attention, particularly the Debussy project. I’ve coupled them in a single review because if you prefer to transfer your downloads to disc rather than just play them from your hard drive or mp3 device, they fill up a pair of CDs nicely, whereas the first program is too short for one disc and the other is too long.

I’ll make quick work of the first pairing. Contrasts, played by Erin Keefe, Jose Franch-Ballester, and Gilles Vonsattel, benefits from a sometimes bluesy feel in the violin and properly acerbic playing in the clarinet’s high register; the finale has lots of paprika. The Dvorák (performed by Yoon Kwon, Erin Keefe, Beth Guterman, Efe Baltacigil, and Wu Han) receives an ardent performance but one not as high-strung as American ensembles can be these days. The cellist plays with a singing tone, and pianist Wu Han offers many pearly passages. There’s gentle animation where needed in the slow movement, the third balances playfulness with lyricism, and the final movement begins as a scamper, then gradually builds force and power. Both performances hold up very well against the competition, although detailed comparisons seem a bit beside the point if you’re downloading this material for casual listening.

In 1915, Claude Debussy planned to pay tribute to his French Classical forebears (they were really Baroque, but the French hated that term) with a set of six sonatas for diverse instruments. He lived to complete only three, masterpieces all; early in this century, a consortium including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln center asked three of today’s leading composers to complete the project, using Debussy’s instrumentation but writing in their own style. The new pieces were premiered in 2004, but not until two years later were they presented in the context of Debussy’s own work, and this is a recording of that concert. Each of the new pieces follows one of Debussy’s sonatas, providing many opportunities for comparison and contrast, particularly of how the four composers approach timbre.

At this point, with many recordings of the Debussy sonatas already available, the new works are of greatest interest, so I’ll begin there. Debussy set a real challenge in planning a sonata for harpsichord, oboe, and horn, and Steven Stucky took it on in the form of brief preludes that tend to keep the oboe and horn isolated from each other, not overwhelming the harpsichord. Interestingly, the presence of the harpsichord does not lead Stucky down the Neoclassical path; he offers essentially a series of short conversations between the blown instruments, with the harpsichord indulging in rolled chords and lots of passagework that never sounds like “sewing-machine music.” Each movement has a fanciful title, and the musical material ranges from the largely static “Pierrot Hides in the Shadows” to the comparatively hyperactive “Fireworks.”

One of today’s experts in timbrel possibility is surely Kaija Saariaho, yet she was assigned the relatively conventional combination of piano, viola, and cello. The odd movements in this five-movement suite are nocturnal, but each is increasingly more intense than the last. The even movements are nervous scherzi, the first an ostinato, the second more grim and violent. The work’s title, I Feel a Second Heart, refers to a mother sensing her unborn child, and the character of the music makes one wonder just what sort of mother this woman will turn out to be.

The most difficult problem—piano, clarinet, bassoon, and trumpet—fell to Marc André Dalbavie. His solution, inititially, is to create a tumultuous piano part and let the other instruments fend for themselves. This opening gesture repeats with refinements, the downward-cascading piano motif answered more intelligibly (if briefly) by the other burbling instruments. There’s a more static, nocturnal section, with long-held notes from the various instruments and quiet chords in the piano; again, that downward figure is sometimes present, but subtly. A scherzo section maintains a rapid piano ostinato under wind lines that alternately percolate and sail.

The performances all seem authoritative, even in the familiar Debussy sonatas. The flute-viola-harp work is properly atmospheric (the performers are Ransom Wilson, Paul Neubauer, and Heidi Lehwalder); in the cello sonata, the excellent Gary Hoffman and Jeffrey Kahane really capture the whimsy of the middle movement; the Violin Sonata, in the hands of Elmar Oliveira and Jeffrey Kahane, isn’t as bluesy as it might be, and Oliveira’s tone becomes quite grainy when he uses the mute, but it’s a generally satisfactory performance.

The sound quality of these concert recordings is close and a little bright, with the balance somewhat congested in the Dalbavie, but overall presenting the scores and the players to their best advantage. James Reel