Aspen Music Festival (5): The Emerson Quartet (and members thereof) and the Aspen Chamber Orchestra (conductor Nicolas McGegan) provide the highlights of a busy week. 17.07.2006 (HS)

 

Aspen regulars look forward to the annual concert featuring David Finckel, the Emerson Quartet's cellist, and his pianist wife, Wu Han. Saturday night's special event in Harris Hall found the duo mining the wit and color in the Shostakovich Cello Sonata in D major and the dramatic turns and endless invention of the Britten Cello Sonata in C major.

 

But the centerpiece of the concert, the reason to shell out the extra bucks for this special event, was the Shostakovich Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor. Violinist Alexander Kerr, an Aspen regular who had never played with the duo before, joined them for a blazing account of this monumental chamber work.

 

Finckel has the technical mastery to play the opening harmonics perfectly in tune and display all the colors of Shostakovich's writing for the cello throughout the piece. Kerr can stay right with him, and Wu Han brings a rhythmic spring to the proceedings that makes the whole piece move inexorably. Despite her slight size, she makes the massive chords that start the Passacaglia peal like church bells and the double octaves of the sardonic Jewish dance in the finale cavort. She can also pull back and nudge the merest hint of sound into the chords that thump quietly behind the opening tune of the finale, yet keep the rhythm completely taut.

 

My only quarrel with the interpretation was the insanely fast pace of the second movement, the Scherzo, marked Allegro. The speed made the piece sound brilliant when I think Shostakovich meant it to be savage. It also threatened to come unglued on two or three occasions, and there wasn't enough space to allow the cello and violin their rapid crescendos in one sequence.

 

The rest was mesmerizing. It got big and loud when it needed to, but the magic was in the descrescendos. The entire third movement, the Passacaglia, was a long opening shout, followed by an extended sigh. The piece ended in a heartbreaking hush.

 

That concert couldn't have been more of a contrast with Friday night's Aspen Chamber Orchestra program in the Tent. Nicolas McGegan's terpsichorean style of conducting might have been distracting for some, but the English-born conductor got the musicians to achieve an irresistible buoyancy in Mozart's and Vivaldi's music. The centerpiece, which came after intermission, was Vivaldi's Violin Concerto in G minor, in which the soloist, Sarah Chang, put her pinpoint accuracy and elegant phrasing to perfect use.

 

Before intermission, Mozart's short Symphony No. 32 in G Major charmed winsomely under McGegan, who conducted the early music without a podium. Aspen faculty took center stage in Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major, a sort of quadruple concerto that found oboist Richard Woodhams, clarinetist Ted Oien, bassoonist Per Hannevold and hornist John Zirbel in sprightly form.

 

Plymouth Town, an early bon bon of a ballet score from Benjamin Britten, concluded the proceedings. This was the first U.S. performance of a piece Britten wrote as a teenager and which recently was discovered. It had its world premiere in 2004. Even at this early stage, some of the musical gestures we know from Britten's more mature works are already in place: the pedal tone that seems one step off, certain harmonic turns, and an abundance of musical ideas. It fitted the lightweight nature of the evening.

 

Those two concerts held considerably more allure than the strange goings-on in the Aspen Festival Orchestra concert Sunday in the Tent. French conductor Emmanuel Villaume, who is music director of the Spoleto USA festival, conducts a lot of opera. Maybe that's why he employs such broad gestures, even in quiet music. He's a tall guy with a big wingspan, which makes him look rather like a loon landing on a lake. Which wouldn't matter a whit if the music emerged as something special.

 

Alas, the opening piece, Ravel's Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, started off heavy-footed and only found some grace in the quieter moments. Ravel's Daphis et Chloe Suite No. 2 never achieved any delicacy, although the final rush in the finale revved up into some excitement.

 

In between, Chang wowed the crowd with a distinctly extroverted account of the Bruch Violin Concerto, and Leon Fleisher did the best he could with Hindemith's Piano Music for the Left Hand with Orchestra. That one allowed for any sensitivity only in the slow middle section, which featured a conversation between the piano and the English horn against a walking bass. If only the grind-away outer movements were as charming.

 

Thursday the Emerson Quartet's second concert of the week, this time in the Tent, included Beethoven and Mendelssohn, but once again their kinship with the music of Shostakovich trumped all. Both the Beethoven String Quartet in F minor, op. 95, and the Mendelssohn String Quartet No. 3 in D major came off as graceful, appealing works, but the moment they launched into the Shostakovich String Quartet No. 9, we were in a different league.

 

Everything about the Shostakovich work, its harmonic colors, its rhythmic drive, the Russian shape of its melodies, plays to the Emerson's strengths. They understand the overall arch of the music and drive it home with the confidence and deftness that only total familiarity can achieve.

 

In his recital Wednesday in Harris Hall with the pianist André-Michel Schub, violinist Cho-Liang Lin showed a greater affinity for more modern composers than for Mozart. He played through the Mozart Violin Sonata in D Major and Violin Sonata in G Major with elegance and charm. But the Walton Violin Sonata and new piece by contemporary Chinese-American composer Bright Sheng, Three Fantasies for Violin and Piano, sprang to life more vividly. Lin was especially affecting in the Walton, which wears its Romantic heart prominently. His gentle approach to the simple folk-like tune in the first  of the three fantasies, and the final phrases of the third, in which he loosened his bow to make the violin sound more like a Chinese erhu, were particularly arresting.

 

Harvey Steiman