Prelude
The muted steel-gray of an overcast day greeted my rising with serious intent. The rising and falling of several intense emotional states in friends and co-workers throughout the day kept my mind on practicing equanimity. As I strolled to this evenings concert, a one-armed flower seller cursed at me for smiling and nodding in silent greeting.
Talking about music is like dancing about architecture. –Steve Martin
This evening’s concert, the title of which had already changed from Marina Lomazov and Friends to Andrew Armstrong and Friends due to Marina’s being rendered out of commission by an accident, became simply Friends as the musicians took the stage. Proving himself (yet again…) a hearty Piccolo Spoleto stalwart, Andrew Armstrong stepped into the emotionally draining and icily stark world of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2, Op. 67 with a grace and ease that belied the fact he had only two days of practice with fellow trio members Yuriy Bekker and Norbert Lewandowski. Now, these are musicians who know each other well and play together quite often, but two days? The results spoke for themselves.
From the muted, ghostly lament of Mr. Lewandowski’s cello which opens the work, the die was cast for the entire performance. Music need not be what conventional taste might call “pretty” to be important, fruitful, and yes, even beautiful. As the Andante picked up steam (so to speak…) I was struck by our trio’s precise sense of timing. The always crisp and full tone Charleston audiences have come to know and love from Mr. Bekker led a sure path through the fugato, creating a near perfect balance of worry and quiet dread in the minor tonal sections, and the sense of a starkly open plane, so characteristic of Shostakovich, in the sections of major key tonality. In the Allegro con brio there was a marked emphasis on the brio, which burst upon the audience with thunderous rolls, laying bare the object of nameless dread. Thrilling! Our string players stopped to adjust their tuning before diving into the icy waters of the Largo. Although this short movement is based on a simple, repeated chord progression in the piano, the space created allowed our strings to call forth an unsmilingly devastating melody, ravishing in its intensity. The Allegretto - Adagio which closes this trio aptly summed up the work with its hallucinatory one-pointedness of intent and just over the county line to sinister arrangement of a Jewish folk tune. The Largo’s theme returned, slowing the proceedings down, and we found the barest whisper of life (or if not life, then peace…maybe…), in the nearly silent pluck of strings with which we were left. Devastating. Gloriously so.
When Mr. Bekker and Mr. Lewandowski returned to the stage they were accompanied by violinist Alan Molina, Jill King, viola, and pianist Joseph Rackers for Alfred Schnittke’s harrowing Piano Quintet. This work stands as not only a fulcrum of Schnittke’s work, but also as an introspective anomaly in his usually outward looking output. Mr. Lewandowski introduced the work, advising us of Schnittke’s “bitter and sarcastic style,” based on simple structures, and warned that if he could only use one word to describe Schnittke’s oeuvre, that word would be “despair.”
A childlike dirge opens in the piano as the Moderato begins, with occasional flurries of rapidly passing dissonance. The strings pick up on that dissonance and give it an echo, creating a creepily brutal landscape of grief. An insistent single note ostinato, high on the piano announces a return and “beautifully” ends the movement with the silence of death. The simple original structure of In tempo di Valse gets layered as a cannon, creating a ghostly meeting when carried by all five musicians (oh, the pleasure/pain of those minor second intervals!), and a moonscape of devastation when carried by two or three. Throughout the Andante, Lento, and the closing Moderato pastorale, I found myself lost in this reverie on the effects of death upon the living. From the micro-tonal washes that called forth the ghost to the air-raid siren wails of grief unassuaged, Schnittke searches in vain for relief, finally inviting us to bite the tin foil with him. As the last movement progresses, a quiet, meditative quality slowly seeps in as the barest of undertones. The strings back off as the piano falls into its ostinato once again. And then there is silence. This dense, thorny, and oddly accessible work was played with a clarity and attention to detail which truly brought to “life” this unpretty, yet devastatingly beautiful masterpiece.
Postlude
A digitized image of Marc Chagall’s Birthday greets me as wallpaper when I open my cell phone. I think of my friend, who placed it there today at lunch. I smile.
