Albers Trio
Three ways of being Modern, with poise
April 22, 2009Making its local début on April 19 for the San Antonio Chamber Music Society, the young Albers Trio applied considerable maturity and poise to a program that might be characterized as three approaches to Modern harmony -- even though one of the composers lived and died in the 18th century.
The Albers is unusual on two grounds. It is a rare instance of a visiting string trio (violin, viola, cello), as opposed to the relatively common piano trio (piano, violin, cello). Also unusual, if not quite rare, is that the Albers is a trio of sisters -- Laura (violin), Rebecca (viola) and Julie (cello) Albers.
Their program was smartly chosen and organized. They began with American composer Phillip Magnuson’s Little Suite (1976) followed by Heitor Villa-Lobos’s String Trio of 1945. They closed with Mozart’s Divertimento in E-flat, K. 563, a late work and a very substantial one despite the lightweight implications of its rubric.
The program note for Magnuson’s piece informs, “The object was to create music using a twentieth-century pitch language accessible to young or inexperienced ears.” The resulting music is and often sounds 12-tone and Schoenbergian in its melodic intervals, but it also employs chordal harmony in a way that is much closer to the Romantics than to the Second Viennese School. The somber second movement recalls the sound world of the late string quartets of both Beethoven and Shostakovich. The last of its four movements mixes ragtime tropes with European high Modernism. Though the Little Suite is brief in duration -- six minutes total -- it is not little in ideas and intellect, or in the composer’s capacity to create a fully developed structure on a tiny canvas.
Villa-Lobos’s String Trio stands squarely in the tonal (sometimes bitonal) European Modern mainstream, and apart from his “nationalistic” music drawing from Brazilian folk idioms, but its lively rhythmic sense and some of its fragrant harmonies suggest that Brazil was still part of the mix. The program note cites a review of the premiere by a New York Times critic, who described the piece as “a lush score cast fully in the language of mainstream neo-Romanticism” -- a term, accurate in the context of the time, that became degraded in later decades by application to music of much more regressive and timid character.
Mozart was not, of course, a Modern composer, but the harmonic modulations in the second movement, adagio, of his Divertimento in E-flat are so astonishing, even bizarre, that one wonders what he was smoking. The fourth movement, andante, begins with a ditty so simple and childlike it could have been sung by a certain annoying purple dinosaur, but the variations that follow eventually attain a complexity that anticipates Beethoven, if not Metallica.
The performances were consistently intelligent, engaged and polished. At times the playing may have been a touch too refined, as in the first menuetto of the Mozart Divertimento, which could have been more rambunctious. But it was interesting to hear three subtly different approaches to rhythm when, for example, Mozart would have the three voices play a similar phrase consecutively. Sisterhood does not foreclose individuality.
Mike
Greenberg
