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A Journey in Sound
"Praise Music" in a Nazi Stalag
Thursday, June 24, 2005
By Paul M. SomersChamber Music at Great Gorge: David Niwa (violin), Eugene Moye (cello), Gail Niwa (piano, director). Schoenfield: Café Music (1986); Szymanowski: "Fountain of Arethuse" from Myths, op. 30 (1915); Messiaen: "Louange à l'éternité de Jésus" from Quartet for the End of Time (1941); Tchaikovsky:
Trio in A minor, op. 50 (1881). St. Francis de Sales, Vernon.The final concert of the Chamber Music at Great Gorge season had a shape which made the entire concert into one large artistic conception. This was not a simple matter of having the trio play the first and last pieces with each string player having his own solo in between, though that is what happened. Nor was it a matter of placing three 20th century works on the first half with Tchaikovsky's monumental 19th century Trio as the second half, though that is another thing that happened.
The real shape was a journey from the brightly swinging opening of Paul Schoenfield's popular Café Music to the final epitaph-like cortége of the Tchaikovsky work. The way-stations were the impressionist "Fountain of Arethuse" by Karol Szymanowski, a too rarely heard work for violin and piano, and the glacial yet inexorable "Louange à l'éternité de Jésus" (Praise to the Eternity of Jesus) for cello and piano from Olivier Messiaen's intense masterwork Quatuor pour le fin du temps ("Quartet for the End of Time"). The listener faced the shape directly when the intermission was reached via a dying away *pianissimo. Had pianist Gail Niwa, who played every piece, not needed a break it would have been effective to present the whole concert without pause, for the heavenly conclusion of Messiaen would have blended almost as a segue into the opening of the sorrowful, even angry elegy which opens the Tchaikovsky trio.
The trip from a café to a funeral procession was artistically shattering. It was also very well played indeed! Ms. Niwa, one of the top pianists in a state filled with top pianists, showed herself all evening to be a player of great versatility. The stylistic leaps required for this concert were broad: from Schoenfield's modernist and virtuosic take on jazz to Szymanowski's Debussy-informed score, on to Messiaen's demands for dynamic control, and finally the concerto-level pianism of Tchaikovsky. She provided all with her deep musicality and mix of care and abandon.
If there was one problem it was not with Ms. Niwa but with the too small piano. It was only a step above a "baby grand" and simply did not produce the brilliance needed for Tchaikovsky, nor the color variations which would have raised the "Fountain" to an even more shimmering quality.
Ms. Niwa's brother David, who has appeared with the Chicago Symphony and is assistant concertmaster with Columbus, was excellent throughout. But nowhere was he more engrossing than in the rarely played "Fountain of Arethuse", which he played from memory. If ever there was an example of the musical advantage of getting the notes out of the way, this was it. Every tone had meaning, every phrase a shape, and the whole work added up to a depiction of mythic mystery.
Cellist Eugene Moye, too, was in top form. Sure, he, like the others, had oodles of notes in Schoenfield and Tchaikovsky, and they all came out with the requisite excitement. But when I asked my father, who attended with me, what his favorite piece was from the concert, he took a brief pause then said, "The one with the solo cello." He did not know the Messiaen Quartet in whole or in part before this concert. But the "Louange à l'éternité de Jésus" impressed him greatly. It is a piece without any hint at technical difficulty if that is understood to mean "fast fingers." But Moye executed what was in its own way the technical tour de force of the evening: controlled slow bowing and, with Gail Niwa, the absolutely perfect calculation of the extended *crescendo which achieves a *fortissimo, then drops back immediately to *piano. It was riveting.