SALT BAY CHAMBERFEST

Portland Press Herald

Portland Press Herald
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Concert Review of Friday, August 25, 2006

Beethoven gives Salt Bay Chamberfest grand finale

The Salt Bay Chamberfest ended on a high note Friday night with a fine performance of the Beethoven "Archduke" Piano Trio (Opus 97) at Damariscotta's Round Top Center for the Arts.

One of Beethoven's most light-hearted and exciting works, the trio was given a dazzling interpretation by Soovin Kim on violin, Allison Eldredge on cello and Thomas Sauer on piano, all of whom seemed to be having as good a time as the audience.

Beethoven's music is noted for explosive sforzandos, and the "Archduke," named for Beethoven's pupil, friend and patron, Archduke Rudolph, is full of such surprises. Its ending fireworks might be considered an extended sforzando, if there is any such thing.

The scherzo of the trio is one of the few in music that lives up to the name of "joke." It is actually funny, with its infinite number of false climaxes, after which one instrument or another takes up a lugubrious chromatic theme, converts it to cheerfulness and goes on to the next climax, until the piano gets fed up with the whole thing and prevents another repetition.

The theme of the andante doesn't seem like much at first, but its variations build powerfully right to the final allegro, which is launched without pause. The ending brought cheers from a large audience.

The first two works on the program were more thought-provoking than enjoyable, in spite of excellent performances. The first consisted of excerpts from John Corigliano's "Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan," sung by Lucy Shelton, accompanied by Thomas Sauer on piano.

The poems were "All Along the Watchtower," "Masters of War" and "Blowin' in the Wind," all of which are great poetry without Dylan's music. Corigliano has given them new and jagged "classical" settings which are, perhaps, more illustrative of the words, but overly dramatic.

The game is to try to forget the well-known melodies and concentrate on the anti-war meaning of the poems.

Someone once said, apropos of Tolstoy, that most great writing is bad writing. Dylan is no exception, but some of his lines, such as "Let us not speak falsely now, the hour is getting late,"stick in the mind like passages from the King James Bible.

In the songs, most of these lines are ironically thrown away, but in the end that may be more effective than highlighting them musically.

Another great poem, by Pablo Neruda, is set in Peter Schat's 1974 "Canto General: In memoriam Salvador Allende." It was given a fine reading by Shelton, with Catherine Cho on violin and Pedya Muzijevic on piano, but the poem stands better on its own feet.

While there are some moments when words and music come together, Schat's long-sustained level of intensity eventually becomes too much, especially in an idiom that can only be characterized as post-Schoenberg.

Christopher Hyde’s Classical Beat Column appears in the Maine Sunday Telegram.