Monday night 15 August saw the welcome return of the Gryphon Trio. A near capacity audience in the DF Cook Recital Hall was testimony to the support in the St. John's area for high calibre chamber music, and the special place this trio holds in the hearts of music lovers.
The concert did not have a thematic title (the Trio's name is sufficient to draw in an audience without the need for spin), but in retrospect appassionata would have been appropriate, with two of the evening's offerings bearing that musical notation. More of that later.
The Tuckamore Festival brochure never offers program notes to help the audience prepare for performances, although sometimes a pre-concert talk is given. On Monday night pianist James Walker pithily described the circumstances surrounding Debussy's early work, his Piano Trio in G major, composed in 1882, but then "lost" for almost exactly one hundred years before re-emerging in 1982. Arnold Schönberg was not impressed when he first heard it, classifying it as juvenilia, a slur which may have contributed to the work not being performed very frequently since. The Gryphon Trio, clearly, think otherwise, and judging by the physical state of the scores they were playing from, have made it a part of their repertoire, at least for the moment.
Just at the end of his teenage years, Debussy was hired as a music teacher to a wealthy, aristocratic family. He was to teach the younger children the rudiments of music, develop the musical talents of a twenty-seven-year-old daughter during the day, and play duets with the mother in the evening. After travelling for part of the year the family settled in one spot and in short notice a 'cellist and a violinist were hired. Here (may I imagine?) was the beginnings of a double trio: Debussy, mother and daughter; Debussy, violinist and 'cellist. I don't know how long the arrangement lasted, but if you are looking for a narrative to underpin Debussy's composition, it is not hard to find. The first movement opens with a simple theme of five notes that do not make a tune but offer endless possibilities for variation. 'Cello and piano, piano and violin answer each other in a series of duets as the composer/piano interacts with the mother/'cello, then daughter/violin. The mood is, in contemporary spin parlance, sunny, the composer is contented to be in bucolic surroundings. The second movement moves into a slightly more sombre mood; there are clouds on the horizon, as yet unspecified. The scherzo in the third movement might be considered to be a series of images of the younger children in the family running around, with the composer joining in. The final movement, however, with its sudden changes in tempo and key, perhaps portrays the complications that arise with the introduction of two other performers in the real life situation: the original trio has superimposed upon it a trio of musicians resulting in the trio composition by Debussy. Fanciful? Perhaps.
James Parker yielded the microphone to Dr Andrew Staniland for the introduction to the two short works that concluded the first half of the concert. As he explained, "14 Seconds" is the fifth movement of a fourteen movement work Dark Star Requiem chosen to open the 2010 Toronto Luminato Festival. The libretto for this oratorio/opera was drawn from a series of poems written by Jill Battson in reaction to the AIDS epidemic that was sweeping, apparently unchecked and unstoppable in the 1970s and 1980s. The title alludes to the chilling statistic that world-wide, one person died from AIDS every fourteen seconds. Staniland has taken on a seemingly impossible structural limitation of composing fourteen short pieces, each lasting fourteen seconds. I have yet to hear the complete work, but this extract does provoke a question that has received a fair amount of debate: when faced with a massive trauma (Auschwitz is the perennial choice) is art even possible? Theodor Adorno posed the question (somewhat baldly, and later retracted it because it was so often cited without the full context of his argument). AIDS cannot be put in the same category as the extermination camps of the the Second World War, but it was a trauma that affected many individuals with enormous impact. The sole clue to the structure of the piece, which was, I am sure, a first hearing for the majority of the audience, was provided in Staniland's introduction: a theme and variations. The theme is simple, repeated, harshly accented notes on the piano at first, taken up by the 'cello and violin. If you are looking for narrative, then perhaps the sound of a heart monitor next to a dying patient, the pulse rate quicker than normal as the body tries to fight the spreading disease and the mind tries to cope with that realization. The first few movements are clearly marked off with a slight pause, the trajectory the music might be creating cut off abruptly. But as the work progresses, there is no pause, not the slightest relief. There are key changes, changes in rhythm and pace, but each fourteen seconds barely has time to establish itself before the next "life" moves to centre stage. Towards the end, the mood becomes more intense; is this rage against the dying of the light? Until finally, the beat of the heart monitor flatlines... a single note, high in the 'cello's register, morendo.
For the second of Staniland's pieces, "Solstice Songs", the audience was given no help. While the composer had indicated that it was to be performed attaca, with no break between to the two pieces, there was a pause while the trio, some more quickly than others, removed the first score from their stand and set up the second. It did give the audience time to take the impact of "14 Seconds", but we had no preparation. The musical notation the program simply said: "Lively, Dance-like", and while it lived up to the first, I defy anyone to dance to this music! I certainly enjoyed the music, as did the Gryphon Trio who bounced with the sudden stops and starts, fortissimo to pianissimo. But I will need to hear it again. Once again, the finale was characterized by passionate playing.
On the question of hearing contemporary compositions more than once, Dr Staniland, in his introduction to last Saturday's performance of new works by Tuckamore Young Composers, said how fortunate they were to hear their composition performed twice, once in the composers segment at 7pm, and again in the main concert at 8pm. He also observed that their new works were, in the second performance, being presented in the company of some of the Western tradition's greats: Brahms, Dvorzak, Fauré, and the like. It is a mark of Staniland's stature that his compositions tonight stood up well in the context of Debussy and Mendelssohn.
The second half of the evening consisted of the single work, Felix Mendelssohn's Piano Trio no.2 in c minor, op.66. This is a late work, composed just a few years before his death and shows the complexity of a mature artist's mind at work. James Parker's playful introduction offered up a narrative drawn from the Jason Bourne series of action dramas: first movement "full of car chases, explosions, narrow escapes; the second movement "a peaceful interlude in a Mediterranean luxury hotel (James Bond?); I can't remember Parker's characterization for the third movement; and, the fourth movement, more dramatic action, accelerating to a triumphant conclusion. My narrative would substitute a Victorian melodrama for Jason Bourne, with the villain tying the heroine to the railway tracks and... you get the picture. Such narratives do help the concert-goer who has no formal musical training (and perhaps little concert experience such as myself) to grasp complex artistic creations which take thirty minutes to unfold.
In response to a much deserved standing ovation, the Gryphon Trio gave us Piazzolla's "Autumn". I have become a fan of tango dancing, both the balletic, dancing-with-the-stars routines by young performers whose joints do not seem to obey the laws of physic, but especially those where the dancers are my age, their movements more gentle, but the sexual innuendo all the more powerful for being understated. So it was with last night's performance: the rubato passages only ever-so-slightly slowed, then quickened, the lingering slide of the trailing foot referenced by the glissando on violin and 'cello.
What a night!
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