Trio Solisti and clarinetist Alan Kay:
Linking plain and Parnassus with ferocious conviction
January 21, 2008The music we call "classical" has always been assembled high on Parnassus from components originating in the crowded plain -- folk dance, popular song, military and religious music. What would Mozart's mature operas have been without 18th-century Vienna's equivalents of the dance hall and Vaudeville?
In an altogether brilliant concert Sunday in Temple Beth-EL for the San Antonio Chamber Music Society, Trio Solisti (violinist Maria Bachmann, cellist Alexis Pia Gerlach and pianist Jon Klibonoff) and clarinetist Alan Kay showed the process of transformation at work in modern times, mostly in the Americas.
The chief revelation came in a very familiar work. Paul Schoenfeld's "Cafe Music" for piano trio has been played at least three times in San Antonio over the past decade or so, most recently during the 2006 Cactus Pear Music Festival. They were all polished, high-spirited performances that emphasized the music's parodistic quality, an admiring but over-the-top sendup of American pop, jazz and blues of the 1920s and '30s.
In Trio Solisti's performance on Sunday, "Cafe Music" was no less delicious or witty, but it was also more serious -- richer, deeper and more layered. The difference had partly to do with tempo choices. The central andante moderato was broadened and given a soulful flexibility that had one foot in Tin Pan Alley and one in central European high Romanticism. The outer fast movements were jet-propelled and aptly rollicking, but the musicians also took care to play every gesture with ferocious conviction, raising the stakes considerably.
Gerlach in particular astonished with every fearless pounce and every inconsolable wail. This is a musician to inspire not just admiration, but worship.
The trio's account of Astor Piazzolla's "Four Seasons of Buenos Aires" was a tad less smoky and dangerous than the Cactus Pear performance last summer, but perhaps more revealing of the music's well-controlled complexity.
Bela Bartok's "Contrasts" for clarinet, violin and piano, composed for Benny Goodman, benefited from Kay's elegant soft-suede tone and limitless facility, from Bachmann's intense phrasing and spunky timbre and from splendid teamwork all around.
Kay, backed by the full trio, was electrifying in three songs from the Klezmer tradition. He has the style in his bones -- the inflections from Yiddish speech and cantorial prayer, the jazz-age audacity.
Kay and the full trio were also together in a definitive account of Paul Moravec's "Tempest" Fantasy, winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Comprising five character pieces inspired by Shakespeare's play, this music is engaging, astute in its imagery and beautifully crafted in a free and pragmatic tonal idiom. "Ariel" skitters and scoots madly in air. "Prospero" waxes dolorous and wistful. "Caliban" galumphs on bass clarinet. A lovely long-lined violin melody traces "Sweet Airs." The closing "Fantasia" is a jazzy whirlwind.
Mike Greenberg
