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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
July 25, 2019
Of all the instruments which are a regular part of an orchestra, the clarinet is the most recently invented. True, there are some more recent — the saxophone and cornet spring immediately to mind — but these have failed to achieve the essential status accorded to the clarinet. And while it may be validly argued that the refined instrument of today is somewhat different from that generally thought to have been invented by Johann Christoph Denner around 1700, the same is also true of many other instruments, which have been continually "improved" (the quotes are by way of acknowledging that some feel differently) over the last three centuries.
Clearly, then, there is something rather special about the clarinet.
Certainly that special something was to the fore in Thursday's outstanding Victoria Summer Music Festival concert, which consisted of two of the best-known chamber works for the instrument, in conjunction with two which should be far better known than they are.
The evening opened with Poulenc's Clarinet Sonata, one of the last works he completed.
In the reliable hands of Jose Franch-Ballester and Arthur Rowe this turned out to be pure delight, from its spiky, indisputably French opening to its perky and playful finale.
The opening movement featured a sinuously lovely second subject although, given that the music dates from 1962, what sounded like a quote from John Williams' incidental music for the Harry Potter movies must have been coincidence — or clairvoyance.
The delicious Romanza was perfect for a warm summer's evening, although its close was somewhat enigmatic and the finale, as intimated above, was great fun.
A minor revelation, perhaps, but for at least one listener a revelation nevertheless.
I will readily confess to a somwhat ambivalent relationship with the music of Béla Bartók. There is a handful of works that I greatly enjoy as well as admire — the last two string quartets and the sonata for two pianos and percussion are probably at the top of that list — yet a considerable number of pieces which I either really don't like or simply do not "get" — The Miraculous Mandarin, even without its distasteful scenario, is a good example.
Another example is Contrasts. Every time I encounter it I imagine that this may, finally, be the hearing that unlocks the mysteries of the music.
But not even such a ferociously accurate and, insofar as I can tell, idiomatic performance as the one given by Franch-Ballester, Terence Tam and Rowe could manage to achieve that.
The opening Verbunkos, subtitled "Recruiting Dance", certainly danced and superbly conveyed the sense of the hapless recruitee getting in over his head. Franch-Ballester's cadenza was stunning and the movement's close disarmingly innocuous.
The second movement, Pihenö (Relaxing) is another example of Bartók's "night music" and is notable for the piano's capturing the feel of the cimbalom, the central European hammered dulcimer.
The finale is a fast dance (Sebes) and, even without that clue, the performance itself said all that needed to be saying, being full of rhythmic vitality. Tam's cadenza was little short of astonishing (all the more so as I am told he had never performed the music before) and he managed to find the humour in the music.
A superb performance; I only wish...
Alban Berg's Four Pieces Op.5, for clarinet and piano, are short and almost aphoristic in nature. The first finds the composer pushing against the bounds of tonality; the second was decidely sombre, with gorgeous use of the clarinet's chalumeau register, the third distincly tricksy, while the last was contemplative and enigmatic.
A second revelation in one evening. Will wonders never cease?
It is somewhat strange, although probably in no way significant, that, just as Mozart's first great work featuring the instrument was a trio (for clarinet, viola and piano — the so-called "Kegelstatt" trio), and Beethoven's first published work to include the clarinet was also a trio (his Op.11 for clarinet, cello and piano), so too was Brahms' first "post-retirement" work, the Op.114 trio.
It came as something of a shock, after the decidely twentieth century works by Poulenc, Bartók and Berg, to be suddenly thrust back into the nineteenth.
A welcome shock nevertheless, as Brian Yoon joined Franch-Ballester and Rowe for a glorious performance of this late masterwork.
The exquisitely beatiful tones employed by all three musicians were a notable feature of the performance and communications between them were uniformly excellent. The opening movement swelled in a great arc from the steadily-paced opening to the turbulent climax to the graceful close.
The slow movement opens with a glorious melody for the clarinet, which never fails to melt my heart — nor did it on this occasion — and the dialogue between the cello and clarinet was simply lovely, before the movement came to its rhapsodic close.
Once again one could have deduced the marking of the third movement — andantino grazioso — from the playing, which was graciousness personified, while the finale, despite some gentler episodes, was essentially defiant, showing us a revitalised composer not yet ready to "go gentle into that good night".
Another splendid VSMF concert that lived up to expectations — and more.
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