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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
June 1, 2016
Somewhere between the Phillip T Young Recital Hall and my front door I lost my notebook. Said notebook not only containing my notes for the concert currently under consideration, but also the previous night's.
At least, so I thought when I originally penned (if that is the correct word) those words and faced the prospect of having to write not one but two reviews purely from memory.
It was fortunate indeed that both occasions proved to be particularly memorable.
However, the next morning my wife, Dorothy, found the notebook where it had slipped down beside the passenger seat in my car. And so, despite the memorability of the evening, both reviews have been written utilising my aides memoires. For this relief, much thanks.
When I say that the evening was a memorable one, that does not necessarily extend to thematic memorability — at least, not in the case of Nikolai Myaskovsky, whose Sinfonietta No.2 closed the opening half. Writing tunes which stick in the memory was not, alas, Myaskovsky's strong point.
Which is a pity, even though it may go a long way to explaining why Myaskovsky — despite being called the "Father of the Soviet Symphony" (he wrote twenty-seven of them) and a fairly prolific composer (did I mention that he wrote twenty-seven symphonies?) — should remain under most people's radar.
The Sinfonietta No.2, for example, has many impressive aspects: the arresting opening, which is cast in a sort of lush bleakness (a good trick if you can do it, and Myaskovsky evidently could); the delicious lilt of the second movement; the lovely slow movement, with its meditative viola preceding the dancing central triple-time section; or the soaring violins in the finale.
All of this was performed with the tonal beauty, accuracy and perception we have come to expect from Yariv Aloni and the Galiano Ensemble.
But, and I don't believe I was alone in this, I found that by the time the applause had died away, I had already forgotten all of the melodic material of the work.
There was no such danger with Anton Arensky's Quartet in A minor, subtitled "In Memory of Tchaikovsky" and composed shortly after Tchaikovsky's untimely death; even though the most memorable melody, the basis of the variation slow movement, was one of the older composer's own.
There seem to be two main approaches to writing variations: the more obvious actually does vary the theme, decorating it, stretching and squashing intervals, even inverting or reversing it so that only to the eye is it clear that what is being played actually is a variant (the classic example of this being the lush melody of variation XVIII of Rachmaninov's Paganini Rhapsody, an inversion, in D flat major, of Paganini's A minor theme).
The other approach, mostly used by Arensky in this quartet, is to keep the theme more-or-less unvaried (except for instrumentation) while varying the accompaniment. While this may sound like the "easy option", it has nonetheless resulted in some supremely great music: the slow movement of Haydn's "Emperor" quartet being just one example. (There is also a third style of "variation", much favoured by Tchaikovsky himself, but as this simply consists of playing the theme, then playing it louder, then faster, then louder and faster, we shall draw a veil over it.)
The slow movement, orchestrated by Arensky himself as "Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovsky" is well-known and rightly so. If Arensky had composed nothing else, this single movement would be enough to keep his name alive.
It is good, though, to hear the variations in their original context.
Aloni directed a marvellous performance of the complete quartet. The sombre, chant-like opening is very Russian indeed, and the quicker music which follows seems positively light-hearted by comparison. The slow movement wove its usual spell, helped by the magnificent playing, while the finale, from its weighty opening to its sizzling close, incorporating a rather merry fugato along the way, ended the evening in fine style.
The evening opened with some genuine Tchaikovsky, albeit in an arrangement by Glazunov. The Andante funebre was originally the third movement of Tchaikovsky's String Quartet No.3 (the composer himself also arranged it for violin and piano).
Aloni directed a superb performance, tragic, yet stoic and not gushing. The tender second subject led to an impassioned climax and the whole movement was exceptionally well shaped.
A most enjoyable evening.
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