SEEN AND HEARD UK CONCERT REVIEW: with thanks to MusicWeb International

Fauré, Harrington, Ravel: Erato Piano Trio (Yuri Kalnits, violin; Julia Morneweg, cello; John Paul Elkins, piano), Reardon-Smith Theatre, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, 7.3.2010 (GPu)

Fauré: Piano Trio in D minor, Op.120
Harrington: Twisted Reverie
Ravel: Piano Trio in A minor

Master and pupil; but by the time that Ravel’s trio was premiered in Paris on 28 January 1915, his studies with Fauré at the Conservatoire in that city were long over. And, by a kind of historical irony, Fauré’s solitary piano trio was not premiered until 12 May 1923, some eight years after that of his erstwhile student.

Fauré’s trio was his penultimate work, the work of a sick man, written between August 1922 and the early months of 1923. Despite increasing ill-health, in particular, a painful condition of deafness of which Fauré was making mention as early as 1903, he remained director of the Conservatoire until 1920. The trio – some of it written at the home of his friends the Maillots at their home near the beautiful Lac d’Annecy in the Haute Savoie – is necessarily a work with a strong element of the retrospective. Written in its composer’s mid to late seventies, the trio is decidedly the music of old age; its serenity exists in the knowledge of death’s approach; its energies are remembered as much as current (even in the relative violence of the closing allegro vivo). Perhaps it was not surprising that some of the emotional depths of this essentially introspective work of old age should have eluded the young and very talented musicians of the Erato Trio. In the opening movement Julia Morneweg played the long, lyrical first theme with plenty of feeling and the trio as a whole communicated a good deal of the movement’s complex structure, even if the interplay between instruments occasionally seemed a little stiff and relatively unyielding. The long andantino was studded with beautiful moments, especially towards its close, the shot-silk textures with their ambiguities of self-reflection and memory and their unexpected harmonic resolutions were well realized. In some earlier pages however, the full magic of the movement sometimes evaded the trio’s grasp. They were more consistently impressive in the more outward-facing music of the closing allegro, beginning as it did with a good sense of drama (or at least as near to the dramatic as this subtlest of works ever comes). The playing here had a more assured and natural sense of interplay and musical dialogue.

Ravel’s trio is a more openly extrovert work, less full of enigmas than that of Fauré and the Erato Trio – formed only in 2005 at the Royal College of Music in London – treated the audience to an impressive reading of it. The opening movement (marked modéré) danced persuasively, the music revolving around Ravel’s pedal-points with commendable clarity. The Basque inflections of the opening theme were painted with a light touch and the second theme had a pleasing suavity to it. The second movement, the Pantoum, got sprightly treatment, the whole both engaged and engaging. The chorale-like melody in F major was played with particular beauty, the alternations of thematic materials handled with a clear sense of form and purpose (and the group’s concentration was not disturbed when their cellist lost her bow on the final note of the movement!). In the third movement, John Paul Elkins’ initial statement of the theme in the lower register of the piano created a feeling of spaciousness which was sustained throughout, as Ravel constantly changes the patterns of duet and trio. There was an edge of melancholy to the reading, but any temptation to wallow in this was avoided, and there was real beauty in the movement’s close, as the textual density was reduced and the movement sank back into silence – a silence immediately succeeded by the vivacity of Ravel’s ‘Final’. Here the Erato Trio were particularly satisfying, their precision of ensemble and their unity of purpose particularly striking; the considerable technical demands of the music left them altogether unfazed and the alternations between 5/4 and 7/4 time were integrated into a unified approach to the larger shape of the movement; without inappropriate inflation of effect, the decidedly orchestral nature of Ravel’s writing in this last movement was given powerful expression.

Between these two French trios the Erato sprang an unprogrammed surprise. In the days before the concert the Trio had spent some time working with student composers at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff. They had evidently been especially impressed by the work of one of those young composers, David Harrington, since they chose to give a world premiere of his Twisted Reverie. A single-movement work, Twisted Reverie was characterized by some emphatically accented phrasing, by a series of intense motifs thrown rapidly from instrument to instrument, by its use of brief fragments which coalesced and collided in interesting ways, while slower, more lyrical interludes balanced the work’s exclamatory attacks. Harrington’s writing was well-judged instrumentally – that for the cello seemed particularly effective – and there was a real sense of musical conversation between instrumental equals. There appeared – on admittedly very limited evidence – to be real promise here. The young composer came up to take a deserved bow and to congratulate/thank the Trio.

The Erato Trio is already an accomplished ensemble, and there is every reason to imagine that as they mature further they will be capable of even more in future years.

Glyn Pursglove

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Beethoven: Llyr Williams (piano), Reardon-Smith Theatre, Cardiff, 7.2.2010 

Sonata in F minor, Op.2, No.1
Sonata in A, Op.2, No.2
Sonata in C, Op.2, No.3
 

These three sonatas of Beethoven’s youth (the first to be graced with an Opus number, but not the first that he wrote) are, in important respects already very characteristic of their composer, even if one wouldn’t readily confuse them with the products of Beethoven’s maturity. As in Beethoven’s later work, these sonatas simultaneously exist in an obvious continuity with what had preceded them (insofar as they clearly echo the piano writing of, say, Haydn and Clementi) and also, in what is only a seeming paradox, subvert and tease the expectations which the listener’s familiarity with these precedents, with the tradition out of which the sonatas grow, will have encouraged them to bring to the hearing of this music. They are, that is to say, at one and the same time, profoundly traditional and passionately rebellious – they already embody the essence of Beethoven, in short.

The fine Welsh pianist Llyr Williams, now in his mid-thirties, is currently engaged in a series of concerts which will see him play all of the Beethoven sonatas during 2010 (amidst recitals and concerts, in the first half of the year, in Tokyo, in Innsbruck and at the Wigmore Hall). This concert, in the admirable and valuable series jointly promoted by Cwpanaur and the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, was part of this ongoing cycle.

The first of the three sonatas has claims to be the most immediately striking of the three. Its opening allegro was played by Williams with a persuasive and engaging energy (after a slightly tentative opening), in a performance which captured both the passion and the elegance which coexist in surprising complementarity in this movement, a complementarity expressed both by neat contrasts and by unexpected (yet, with the advantage of hindsight, altogether inevitable) reconciliations of diverse musical materials. Some pianists have perhaps made more of the drama of this fist movement, but Williams’s interpretation clarified structure and pattern with impressive lucidity. The ensuing adagio was an exercise in youthful nobility, which Williams invested with an attractive cantabile quality; here, again, he provided a model of structural clarity, not least in the way he phrased which the elaborated repetitions of the movement’s themes. The judgement of tempo here was persuasively impressive and the whole fused nobility with tenderness. The third movement had a well-considered sense of scale, avoiding the kind of inflation which performances on a modern grand can all too easily acquire in movements such as this. The interpretation of the closing prestissimo had real fire, imbued with a precipitous, stormy momentum, the triplet arpeggios of the closing coda played with gratifying conviction and facility.

The second sonata in the set is, to a degree, differentiated from its two fellows by its more extensive use of counterpoint. In the initial allegro, Williams’s performance was, once more, striking for the clarity with which it exposed the architecture of Beethoven’s writing – a consistent virtue of Williams’s current playing. The stately slow movement, with its long lines over a walking bass, was invested with real solemnity, though Williams also found some gentleness, and even playfulness, in certain passages. The allegretto which follows is dominated by short figures, in contrast to the long melodic phrases which had characterised the slow movement; Williams’s touch struck me as just a little heavy in its opening pages – though it is fair to say that these are pages which generally sound better on the kind of instrument for which Beethoven was writing than they do on the modern grand. There was a delightful grace, though, to Williams’s treatment of the trio. The closing grazioso was just that, and Williams’s reading had about it an attractive, organic fluency, the relative complexities of Beethoven’s structure negotiated with an air of naturalness and relaxation and a sense of power held in check.

The final sonata of the set was once described by Tovey as “luxurious and loosely constructed”, which surely overstates the case or, at any rate, overlooks the real virtues of the music. In the first movement, full of sparkle and invention, Llyr Williams supplied all the virtuosity the music demands, in a performance of considerable panache and relaxed precision. In the adagio the syncopated upbeats and the telling silences of the main theme were very well handled; there was a grave spirituality at times, and the dramatic moment when the initial motif returns in C major (in an e major slow movement) was genuinely arresting; the final cadences had a poignant inconclusiveness which made the transition to the glittering runs of the scherzo, with its imitative writing, all the more effective. The allegro finale, a fast movement in 6/8 time, has an all-embracing vitality and wit, qualities which Williams embraced wholeheartedly. The whole made for an exhilarating conclusion to a Sunday lunchtime very well spent.

Llyr Williams is a pianist of very real quality. His greatest virtues, at present, relate to the firmness of his structural grasp and his sense of musical architecture, his capacity to put the music’s organising principles clearly before the ears and minds of his hearers, but never at the cost of the merely reductive. If I have a slight reservation it is perhaps that his playing, as yet, doesn’t have quite the variety of tone that it might. But his work has a genuine substance, an intellectual weight and (apt) gravity often absent from the playing of some of the more hyped pianists of his generation. Those able to hear all of Williams’s 2010 Beethoven sonata cycle are to be envied.

Glyn Pursglove

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Beethoven and Brahms:  Barbirolli Quartet: Rakhi Singh, Katie Stillman (violin), Ella Brinch (viola), Ashok Kouda (cello). National Museum Wales, Cardiff, 17.1.2010 (GPu)
 
Beethoven String Quartet in A, Op. 18, No.5
Brahms String Quartet in C minor, Op.51, No.1
 
The Barbirolli Quartet, founded in 2003 at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, is one of the most distinguished and promising of the young British-based quartets. They have already notched up quite a few awards – including a Tunnell Trust Award; they have been selected by ECHO (the European Concert Halls Organisation) to undertake a European tour in 2010, which will take them to important venues in Amsterdam, Paris, Salzburg, Cologne, Stockholm, Athens, Barcelona and elsewhere. My description of them as ‘promising’ is not, I hasten to add, intended to carry any of that air of polite reservation which the use of the term can sometimes bear; they already very accomplished and very well worth hearing – but they will doubtless get even better with greater maturity.

The programme they played for this concert in the series of lunchtime concerts held in the Reardon Smith Theatre of the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, was made up of a vividly contrasting pair of quartets (though, interestingly, each was part of the first set of quartets to be published by its composer). The Quartet in A is perhaps the most ‘classical’ of Beethoven’s six opus 18 quartets; urbane and at ease with itself, it is marked by echoes of Mozart’s K464 quartet, with which it shares a key (so much so that it has been described as a ‘commentary’ on the earlier work). In her words of introduction the Barbirolli’s leader spoke of it as a “sunny” and essentially “sprightly” work, epithets it surely merits. Brahms’s C minor quartet, on the other hand is very far being bathed in sunlight; cellist Ashok Kouda introduced this work (describing it as his “favourite piece of music in the world ever”!) and spoke of it in terms of “darkness” and “intensity”.

The Barbirolli’s Beethoven was full of vivacity, and the spirit of the dance was never very far away. The opening allegro had a delightful, inviting sense of instrumental conversation, sometimes quasi-domestic, sometimes implicitly dramatic. In the minuet which follows (as it does in K464), the playing of the two violins in the opening phrase (to be repeated several times in the movement) was strikingly beautiful and the later variations on the theme were also very attractive; much of the movement had a thoroughly Viennese lilt to it, especially in the waltz melody of the trio. In the ensuing andante there was some real emotional weight, but not too much; the whole was very well paced and the way in which the music constantly changes the relationships between the two voices was very persuasively shaped. The opening of the final allegro, though, sounded just a little inhibited, even a little heavy-handed; but as the movement continued more air was let in, and the well-judged contrasts of tempo and dynamics contributed to a sense of unforced finality, of comfortable arrival at an expected destination. Rakhi Singh’s introductory remarks had spoken of this “youthful” work as a “gem” – and pretty well all of the gem’s facets shone brightly in this engaging performance.

Brahms’s first quartet (or, at any rate, the first that he published – he claimed to have worked on twenty predecessors without before being satisfied with the results!) is an altogether more sombre affair. It is a quartet to which the word tragic has often been applied, and with good enough reason. If I say that this performance by the young Barbirolli Quartet wasn’t one to which that epithet was perfectly applicable, I don’t intend to criticise it, but merely to try to say what was distinctive about it. There was plenty of troubled passion in the opening allegro, plenty of that intensity of which Ashok Kouda had spoken in introducing the work. Indeed there was a kind of feverish turbulence (at no cost to discipline) in their reading of the work; there may have been less sheer gravitas than can be heard in some performances, but by way of rich compensation there was a stormy impetuosity. In the second movement, marked ‘Romanze, poco adagio’ there was a certain tranquillity after the violence of the opening storm, but it was never a tranquillity that went long untroubled, being shot through with an apprehension of future disturbance and permeated by a strong sense of melancholy. The movement’s complex rhythms were very skilfully handled, the pauses and silences full of anticipatory awareness. Like the second, the third movement spoke of night more than day, being dominated by a troubled pathos, enlivened only briefly by the pizzicato writing of the trio – the light-heartedness of which felt like no more than a brief respite. The opening bars of the brief closing allegro spoke of renewed anger and ferocity and the ensemble work here was particularly accomplished, the energy sustained in what, though it recapitulates materials from both the first and second movements, felt less like a neat resolution than an insistence all too likely to be repeated. The Barbirolli’s reading of this quartet conveyed their evident enthusiasm for it; I have heard weightier, more fully ‘tragic’ readings of the work; but this performance had about it a particular youthful anguish, as though the music expressed not so much the weight of fully realised tragic experience but rather the youthful anticipation of suffering to come, a youthful apprehension of the human condition. The results were compelling.
 
Glyn Pursglove

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