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July 2, 2018
"We have suddenly discovered our musical Mark Twain, Emerson and Lincoln all rolled into one!"
The words are those of Leonard Bernstein, on the occasion of his conducting the world premiere of Charles Ives' Symphony No.2. Typically, the premiere, in 1951, came almost half a century after the word was composed.
Ives' only piano trio, on the other hand, merely had to wait three or four decades for its first performance: it was probably completed by 1907 with revisions (again "probably") in 1911 and around 1914; the first performance was in 1948 and the first recording in 1966.
There also seem to be rather fewer textual problems surrounding the piano trio than some of Ives' other works (a critical performing edition of the fourth symphony, for example, had to wait until 2017 and has yet to be recorded).
The first half of the JCT Piano Trio's (hereinafter abbreviated to "JCTs") marvellous recital on Monday evening closed with a spectacular performance of the Ives trio, one which, I suspect, revealed Ives' true stature, as the first great American composer (and still, for many of us, the greatest), to quite a few members of the audience.
The remarkable opening movement consists of twenty-seven bars played three times: the first time the violin is silent, the second time it is the cello; all three players only come together in the final iteration. Also, fairly unusually for Ives, there seem to be no quotations in this movement.
The movement was given a particular intensity, which gripped the listener from beginning to end. One immediately noticeable feature was the huge, rich tone produced by cellist Jay Campbell (a fact remarked upon to me at the interval by more than one cellist in the audience), which is not to say that his fellow musicians were any less impressive.
The second movement is probably the most notable (or notorious): TSIAJ ("This Scherzo is a joke") is a challenge both to the performer and listener.
The challenge for the performers is to make this frantic grab-bag of musical quotations and misquotations cohere; frankly, I'm not sure I have ever heard it done so well and I am fairly positive that I have never heard it imbued with such rhythmic vitality: my foot was involuntarily tapping throughout and I could no more have stopped it than I could voluntarily have stopped breathing.
For the audience the challenge is manifold, yet the JCTs made their acceptance that the music has purpose and meaning entirely reasonable; the remaining difficulty is trying to catch the quotations as they fly by — the attempt is doomed to failure and one can only "lie back and think of New England" and enjoy the experience. I was particularly enamoured of the violin's sawing away at the popular song "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay" (a song forever associated with The Cherry Sisters, arguably the worst "entertainment" act in history) and the raucous climax, which I think was based on a hymn.
The final movement is replete with Ives' slightly acerbic lyricism and if Aaron Copland was not familiar with the opening bars, I'll eat my hat.
Again, the performance was well-nigh immaculate, culminating in the final quotation, of the hymn "Rock of Ages" by the cello, bringing the trio to a beautiful close.
A tremendous performance, which is already one of my musical highlights of the year.
As an aside, Ives was born in music's second annus mirabilis for composers: if 1685 (the year in which Bach, Handel and Scarlatti were all born) is the most significant year in musical history, then 1874 must rank a close second, witnessing the births of Ives, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Holst, Josef Suk, Franz Schmidt and Reynaldo Hahn. Ives, who died in 1954, outlived all the rest.
And it was in the following year that Maurice Ravel was born (in fact, less than five months after Ives). Ravel also composed just a single piano trio, in 1914, the year of Ives' final (probable) revisions to his trio. It was composed quickly, in order that Ravel could complete it before joining the French army. (A brave, or possibly foolish, act: as Stravinsky pointed out "at his age and with his name he could have had an easier place, or done nothing".)
It was with the Ravel that the JCTs closed their recital, thus including two of the twentieth century's greatest piano trios in one programme (I'd argue for Shostakovich's Op.67 as the other).
Once again, it was a performance of singular intensity and beauty, from Conrad Tao's limpid pianism at the opening, to the tumultuous, ecstatic close.
The first movement featured knife-sharp ensemble and a remarkable unanimity of tone from violinist Stefan Jackiw and cellist Campbell. The second subject had considerable poise and the movement built to a fiery climax, before subsiding to a gorgeous, hushed close.
The second movement was wonderfully vivacious and was, to quote the composer in another context, tres rhythmé.
The slow movement was poetic in the extreme, taken very slowly and cast in rich-hued tones, before the finale, almost attacca, with its pregnant opening full of anticipation, swept all before it reached its gloriously rhapsodic and rapturous close.
By far the most recent music was the opener, Christopher Trapani's Passing Through, Staying Put, premiered in 2011, although I imagine that a blind listening test would find most people believing the Ives, particularly the scherzo, to be the later piece.
The work, we are told, is cast into two parts, although they are played continuously and I must confess that the transition from one to the other escaped me.
Clearly the JCTs believe in the music and gave it a highly-focused and concentrated performance. I did rather enjoy the first part, with its agile piano and somewhat snarky interjections from the strings. But I am afraid that the pizzicato glissando (or should that be glissando pizzicato? you say potato, I say tomato), heavily featured in part two, did not hold the attention for as long as the composer clearly believed it would.
Moreover, although it was sensible to put the work first, it was always going to come off third-best in company with two great masterpieces. I'd be interested to hear more Trapani, though.
And so Eine Kleine Summer Music ended for another season, a season which has consisted almost entirely of highlights, this final light being perhaps the highest of them all.
Simply terrific. The JCT Piano Trio are undoubtedly a musical force to be reckoned with.
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