The Chamber Music Society of St. Louis programmed their final show of an exciting season around the date of the concert, May 4, as in, may the 4th be with you. There were a lot of 4s and quartets.
The first half of the concert paired two compositions that counted as an Opus 4: Arcangelo (coolest name, ever) Corelli’s Sonata a Quattro for Trumpet and Strings and Benjamin Britten’s Simple Symphony, Op. 4.
The program closed with two pieces that are compilations of four – Aaron Copland’s 4 Piano Blues and Antonin Dvorak’s 4 Romantic Pieces for Violin & Piano – followed by a piece that is not an Opus 4 but rather the 4th in a series: my road dog Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet #4 in C Minor.
Clever gimmick or magic act of musical programming? Yes.
The first half had a doubling of 4s if you counted the musicians: two quartets. Corelli’s Sonata a Quattro for Trumpet and Strings calls for trumpet (Steven Franklin) and strings (Xiaoxia Qiang and Eva Kozma on violins, Alvin McCall on cello). Britten’s Simple Symphony might have been titled Simple String Quartet because that’s what we got, with the three string players from the Corelli being joined on viola by Chris Tantillo.
As for the Corelli, Baroque trumpet with strings, like sushi and pizza, is a category so satisfying in essence that there are no bad examples. It also refreshes the ear to hear a spotlit trumpet, not your everyday solo chamber instrument. Not to distract from the focus on the 4th, but Franklin must have still been high from playing the trumpet feature on Mahler’s 5th with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra less than a month ago. When Franklin took five on the Corelli, he clasped his trumpet and quietly smiled while admiring the strings players.
In Simple Symphony, Britten shows there are more ways to advance a string quartet than by bowing on strings. He titled the second movement “Playful Pizzicato,” but the whole piece is plucky on all strings. Kozma also strummed her violin with her fingertips. Tantillo – who just last week co-curated SLSO’s stunning violafest at the Sheldon – thrummed his viola with his bare knuckles.
Clever gimmick or musical genius? Yes.
None of the players broke the proprietary standards of the orchestra musician, but they could see and hear each other so well that the audience caught some peeks beneath the expressionless veil. McCall – who shredded on Britten’s adventurous writing for cello – gave pointed looks to Qiang and Kozma when they played tasty parts. The violin players appeared to share energies almost continuously. Tantillo would raise McCall one eyebrow arch and just stare at the violinists when they escaped orbit.
All that – and yet Copland’s 4 Piano Blues was the revelation of the night for me. Marc Gordon, Chamber Music Society of St. Louis honcho, told the audience that Copland worked on these 4 blues for 22 years. As Brian Woods performed these four heart-stopping miniatures on piano, I wondered: Which 22 years? Thankfully, Copland (1900-1990) lived a long and productive life. Which 22 years?
Was he writing these blues in 1957 when Cecil Taylor released his first album, Jazz Advance? In the 4th of these blues, Britten takes off like Scott Joplin (who died when the composer was 17 years old and still taking piano lessons) then dissociates and breaks down hard like Cecil Taylor. (I looked it up, and Taylor was born 29 years after Copland and outlived him by 28 years, an odd fact to savor.)
Was Copland writing these blues in 1964, when my favorite blues composer, Charles Mingus – known for playing double bass, an instrument we should hear more at chamber concerts – released Mingus Plays Piano, where he does that and only that? In the third of these 4 blues, Copland had Woods taking his sweet time like Mingus taking apart a blues on the piano.
I asked Gordon about timing after the concert, and he said Copland was reworking these blues from 1926 to 1948 – so before Mingus or Taylor had jumped in. Gordon is good at choosing music that makes you rethink what you think you know.
I was seated at the back of the 560 Music Center with the latecomers and families. I enjoyed the children being exposed to the good stuff at an early age – and fighting to make it through a long program of old people’s music on a school night.
The opening movement of Dvorak’s 4 Romantic Pieces for Violin & Piano caught the children’s attention. Angie Smart, new to the night’s stage (accompanied by Woods), laid into Dvorak’s gorgeous melodies with a sound so expressive it was like the violin was speaking in tongues. Then Dvorak dragged us off into his mad mountain dances. The final movement was a dark mountain lullaby, edged by death, that put the smallest children to sleep. Sweet dreams or nightmares? Yes.
By the time we got to the Beethoven, my boy, I was suffering from profundity of emotion fatigue. I simply was not able to follow everywhere Beethoven and this nimble and attentive string quartet (Qiang, Kozma, Tantillo and McCall) were taking us. Beethoven tends to make me feel like he anticipated all subsequent music, so no surprise that Britten’s string quartet started to sound less startlingly original as Beethoven invented many of the same tricks.
Beethoven’s symphonies cast a spell on me where I forget I am listening or thinking about music, where the music and my thoughts become interchangeable and I get a welcome break from being merely me. But in Beethoven’s 4th string quartet, I never forget I am listening to music – ingenious music, to be sure, but music made by someone who is independent of my consciousness, in fact a jobbing musician of a bygone epoch.
Clever gimmick or musical genius trying to make a buck? Yes.
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