Chamber Music Northwest’s opening fall/winter/spring concert Oct. 5 at The Old Church didn’t present an evening of easy listening, but it elegantly illustrated why we have the music we hear these days. Or at least, some of what we listen to.
From Brahms to Bartók, measures of ragtime, tango, blues and other flavors of jazz turned up in the program’s four classical masterpieces. Except for the opening Brahms’ clarinet sonata, the pieces were composed in the 20th century, about 10 years apart, and their makers boldly incorporated the sounds of popular music into their work.
Many contemporary composers do the same, a clue to why so many young music writers are fans of the turn-of-the-century’s Bela Bartók, Igor Stravinsky and Maurice Ravel.
Violinist/CMNW co-artistic director Soovin Kim with pianist/wife/CMNW co-artistic director Gloria Chien joined former (1981-2020) CMNW artistic director/clarinetist David Shifrin for the four pieces from late romantic Brahms to mid-20th-century Bartók, both written in the composers’ later years. In between fell Stravinsky’s 1918 Suite from the Soldier’s Tale and Ravel’s 17-minute Violin Sonata No. 2, M. 77, written with struggle over four years from 1923-27.
All but Stravinsky’s five-movement suite inspired standing ovations, and Chien, an indefatigable and strikingly tuned-in pianist, played the entire 74 minutes of the concert. She has a way of letting the primary voices or instruments star, yet she moves the music along mellifluously. If she misses a beat or a note, who could tell? Not me. She is extraordinary, as are all three of these seasoned and masterful musicians. They don’t rehearse a lot together, I’m told, though it’s clear how much they enjoy playing with one another. They know these classics well and have played them for years. The music is in their bones and under their skins. (They repeated this concert Oct. 6 in Eugene, Ore., in partnership with the Oregon Bach Festival.)
The concert began with one of Brahms’ later pieces, inspired by his meeting violinist-turned-clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld. Brahms was so impressed with the clarinetist that he emerged from retirement and began to compose for him. The 22-minute Clarinet Sonata No.2 in E Flat Major, Op. 120, No. 2, written in 1894 a few years before Brahms died, was lyrical and yes, optimistic, rather than typically tragic. Chien and Shifrin exchanged smiles as one movement flowed into another in the 22-minute piece.
In the Suite from L’Histoire du Soldat (“The “Solider’s Tale”), pared down from a larger L’Histoire du Soldat, Stravinsky threw in tango, blues and ragtime. The piece was written in 1918; Stravinsky was always ahead of his time.
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But it was the 17-minute Ravel Violin Sonata No. 2, M. 77 that elicited cheering from the classical music fans and boosted them out of their seats. Though it took Ravel four years to write, the piece proved a hit with the second movement, “Blues,” emphasizing the jazz of the ‘20s. Kim and Chien played together, always a blissful duo. As Elizabeth Schwartz wrote in the program notes, “Ravel’s genius lies in creating music that is both spare, even austere, and simultaneously, startlingly, expressive.” And modern.
Bartók’s 1938 Contrasts for Clarinet and Piano, Sz. 111 was the final sizzler piece. Depending upon your affection for or frustration toward Bartók, listeners should know he is “one of the most influential composers of the 20th century,” Kim told me last summer when I was flummoxed by Bartók’s Violin Sonata No. 2 SZ. 76. A huge Bartók fan, Kim continued: “His devotion to preserving folk music and incorporating it into his own personal musical language inspired a century of composers and musicologists, and this is evident everywhere around us today with the fusion of pop music elements and larger classical structures.”
Kim called Bartók “the Beethoven of the 20th century: the energetic precision of rhythm; the development and invention of instrumental sounds for the orchestra, piano, and string quartet; the structures that he builds on tiny simple motifs. Similar to Beethoven’s music, it is extremely difficult to play, and that is why most of the world has not been able to do his music justice until more recently.”
After that explanation, how could I not be moved by Bartók this time around?
This three-movement red-hot Contrasts required Shifrin to interchange two clarinets (the A clarinet in the first and second movements and the B-flat in most of the third movement, though he switched to the A clarinet in the middle section of the last movement). You had to be there.
If that weren’t enough variety, Bartók asks the violinist (Kim, in this case) to play two different violins, one tuned to different intervals than the other – “perhaps,” as Shifrin explained after the concert – “to keep the violinist from feeling left out when the clarinetist switches instruments.”
None other than the great American jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman, an idol of Shifrin’s when he was learning to play clarinet many decades ago, commissioned the piece. Goodman played and recorded the piece with Bartok and the Hungarian violinist Joseph Szigeti, who coordinated the commission when the Hungarian musicians came to the United States. You can only imagine that gig, though bets are that Shifrin, Kim and Chien — all utterly in charge of their instruments — performed a version that Bartók, Szigeti and Goodman would have approved.
The standing-ovation applause thundered for several minutes in the packed church.
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Angela Allen writes about the arts, especially opera, jazz, chamber music, and photography. Since 1984, she has contributed regularly to online and print publications, including Oregon ArtsWatch, The Columbian, The San Diego Union-Tribune, Willamette Week, The Oregonian, among others. She teaches photography and creative writing to Oregon students, and in 2009, served as Fishtrap’s Eastern Oregon Writer-in-Residence. A published poet and photographer, she was elected to the Music Critics Association of North America’s executive board and is a recipient of an NEA-Columbia Journalism grant. She earned an M.A. in journalism from University of Oregon in 1984, and 30 years later received her MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Pacific Lutheran University. She lives in Portland with her scientist husband and often unwieldy garden. Contact Angela Allen through her website.
