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[MUSIC REVIEW] Close Encounters with Music ROMANTIC TROIKA program
10.22.06
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS WITH MUSIC
Mahaiwe Theatre
Great Barrington, Mass.
Saturday October 21, 2006
PROGRAM: "Romantic Troika: Schumann and His Circle"
Review by Seth Rogovoy, critic-at-large, Berkshire Living Magazine
(Great Barrington, Mass., October 21, 2006) -- Tony Award-winning actress Jane Alexander may have been the big draw on the bill for Saturday night’s Close Encounters with Music program at the Mahaiwe in Great Barrington, titled “Romantic Troika: Schmann and His Circle,” but in the end, it was 19th century composer Felix Mendelssohn and the eight musicians who performed his astounding Octet in E-flat Major, Opus 20 who were the real stars of the show.
Mendelssohn was only sixteen years old when he completed the octet in 1825, but like perhaps no other composer other than Mozart, he was already at the peak of his powers at such a young age. Mendelssohn had already produced a full-fledged symphony a year earlier, and he had symphonic proportions on his mind with this piece for octet – or two paired string quartets, if you like.
The potential of eight strings is a lot more than merely two times four, which Mendelssohn and these fine players, including the Amernet Quartet, violinist Yehonatan Berick, and cellist and artistic director Yehuda Hanani, proved. In fact, the resulting power and sophistication – the counterpoint, the varying textures, and the harmonic complexity – were exponential in their expressive ability and broad range, which over the course of the four movements, patterned after a complete symphony, ranged from the achingly poignant to the sprightly quicksilver to the delicately wispy to the highly percussive – and even to the downright unruly, with the cellos rumbling like something more out of Steve Reich than Brahms to introduce the final presto movement of the piece, which grew to a momentous finale that had the entire audience on its feet in what may seem obligatory but was obviously a heartfelt standing ovation.
Not to slight the earlier parts of the program. Brahms’s Sextet in B-flat Major was pleasant and well-proportioned, varied in mood – at times seemingly drawing on Gypsy music for inspiration – and also patterned after a full-fledged symphony. The piece did well to establish a baseline from which the rest of the evening’s music emanated.
The ostensible centerpiece of the concert were three “melodramas” – as Yehuda Hanani pointed out, taking back the literal meaning of the word, melodramas are merely narrative speech accompanied by music. Jane Alexander was a wonderful narrator of these pieces, two by Friedrich Hebbel and one by Shelley, and pianist Babette Hierholzer’s renditions of Robert Schumann’s solo pieces that accompanied, illustrated, and commented upon the texts were evocative and affecting.
In some ways these declamations to music were undoubtedly forerunners to some of the more plainly spoken operatic experiments of Schoenberg and Alberg, and one could even draw a line from some of the sillier aspects of the form all the way to some of the efforts of progressive rock groups like Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, and Electric Light Orchestra to reintroduce narration into the song form.
In this intimate settting, however, they worked as lovely revival pieces, as part of an evening celebrating three composers who lives and times intertwined yet all of whom spoke with distinctive voices, and brought to life by musicians whose commitment to their original vision, as well as to their own art and craft, is beyond question.
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