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First Unitarian Church
June 7, 2015
"It is a common fault nowadays to write for this heaviest of instruments passages that are so fast that even cellos have difficulty in playing them. This has serious disadvantages. Double-bass players who are lazy or who really cannot cope with such difficult parts immediately give up and concentrate on simplifying the passage."
Clearly Hector Berlioz - from whose Treatise on Instrumentation and Orchestration the above quote is excerpted - had neither met (well, obviously) nor envisaged a player like Gary Karr. But then, in the nineteenth century, who had?
It is now almost a decade-and-a-half since Karr and partner Harmon Lewis gave up the life of the peripatetic musician and concentrated their efforts on recording and the annual KarrKamp summer school.
Which means that the two hundred or so people gathered together in the First Unitarian Church on Sunday afternoon were treated to a musical experience which today is as rare as the proverbial fowl's dentition - a recital by the Karr-Lewis Duo.
The storm of applause which greeted the pair as they took to the stage showed that a goodly proportion of the capacity audience were well aware that this was no ordinary recital.
The programme opened with a work by English composer Henry Eccles; or, rather, as Karr put it, given that only the slow movements were actually from the pen of Eccles (and I hope you appreciate that I am manfully resisting any number of Goon Show jokes here), a work "by Henry Eccles and two other composers".
The opening adagio was solemn, noble and really rather moving; the largo poignant and played with some gorgeous half-tones. It was difficult to imagine that the music had originally been composed for another instrument; and even harder to believe that the other instrument in question was the violin. The quicker, non-Eccles movements were athletic and jolly.
The only reason that anybody today has even heard of the arpeggione, that misbegotten spawn of the guitar and cello, is that one of history's true greats, Franz Schubert, was sufficiently enamoured of the instrument to write a sonata for it.
And nobody in their right minds would allow a sonata by Schubert to fall by the wayside - hence the plethora of cellists playing the "Arpeggione" Sonata.
Of course, where cellists venture can Gary Karr be far behind? (Or, indeed, in front?)
The introduction to the opening movement showed Harmon Lewis's pianism at its finest: this was echt Schubert playing indeed. The music itself veers between the nostalgic and the exuberant, a tricky balancing act which the pair managed with aplomb. The second movement was so concentrated that anyone dropping a pin in the hall would have earned frowns of disapproval, whereas the finale had that "smiling through the tears" quality one often finds in later Schubert.
Clearly matters were getting serious when, before the final work of the first half, Grieg's Cello Sonata, Karr and Lewis removed their jackets: "you all look so cool" said Karr, probably not commenting on our collective fashion sense.
Grieg was, of course, a master of the miniature and the cello sonata is one of only a handful of larger-scale works of which the best known is the piano concerto, which also happens to be in A minor.
The key signature was not the only feature the two works have in common and although the first movement is surprisingly stormy and forceful, whole swathes of the development section and final coda sound as if they had been flown in from the concerto.
The lyricism and full-blooded romanticism of the slow movement found the duo at their awe-inspiring best with a climax of great power and beauty. The finale had a folkish feel about it, somewhat reminiscent of his piano piece Wedding Day at Troldhaugen, although the intensity of the final pages spoke of something else.
It is hardly fashionable - nor has it ever been - to admire Ralph Vaughan Williams for his piano-writing. Yet during the Six Studies in English Folksong, which opened the second half of the programme, it struck me that in the right hands - and Lewis's are all of that - the accompaniment had a pellucid quality which was quite enchanting. As, indeed, was the entire work.
Rossini is hardly known for his chamber music and his Duetto for cello and doublebass would, one suspects, still be languishing in a library somewhere were it not for Gary Karr.
Cellist and EKSM co-Artistic Director Laura Backstrom joined Karr for an exercise in musical flirtation, although it took one or two not-so-subtle hints for some of the audience to realise that laughter was not only permitted, it was expected. Backstrom played her part beautifully and I must congratulate her on not breaking down and laughing outright when, for example, Karr adopted an "I'm so bored" expression while playing the "oom-pah" accompaniment to her more melodic flights. (I was reminded of the old joke about two operatic bassists playing Carmen blissfully unaware that "there's this guy singing about bullfighting" over their accompaniment.)
The afternoon ended with a real Karr-Lewis party piece, the Fantasy on Themes from Rossini's Opera Moses in Egypt by the great, allegedly demonic, Niccolo Paganini.
After the solemn(ish - this is Rossini, after all) adumbration of the theme the music became a dizzying display of virtuosity for its own sake, which in lesser hands would not have made for particularly interesting listening.
However, in these four hands it became a wondrous exhibition of the rapport which two great musicians can develop over four decades playing together, as they indulged in some ludicrous, insane, downright hilarious rubato which had the audience in stitches.
The standing ovation was inevitable, but, for once, thoroughly well-earned.
A spectacular opening to this year's season.
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