More Great Chamber Music in Belém

The final faculty concert of the summer workshop Verão Clássico was performed on 29 July in the resplendent Coach Museum in Belém. As in the last concert I saw there, the performance standards were very high, with spirited performances of varied pieces, some quite unfamiliar to me. 

The opening Beethoven Piano Trio in E flat, Opus 1/1 was composed in 1795 when the composer was in his early 20's, and is among his earliest published works. During this period he was mostly known as a piano virtuoso, but was already studying composition with Haydn and Salieri. He was also avidly studying the works of Mozart, who had recently died. The piano trio reflects his studies, and sounds quite Mozartian, with charming melodies and a lighter more purely classical texture than Beethoven would develop in the coming years. There is not much of the later Beethoven to be heard, but the piano part is quite virtuosic, and was superbly played here by the Ukrainian pianist Milana Chernyavska. 

The 1910 Pieces for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano by German romantic composer Max Bruch (1838-1920) demonstrate some of Bruch's swooning lines and chromatic harmonies, most familiar in his famous Violin Concerto. You can't really hear any modernist innovations from the early 20th century here (Stravinsky's Firebird was composed the same year), nor is there the overt drama of his buddy Brahms, but the pieces are well constructed and pleasing. Bruch does not consistently solve the problem of how not to allow the mellow viola get swallowed up in heavy piano textures, a problem Brahms also struggled with. Also, the match of the nasal clarinet with the viola is not always ideally balanced. But the four pieces were good to hear, and were well done by clarinet Pascal Moraguès, viola Miguel da Silva, and piano Felipe Pinto-Ribeiro. 

The Shostakovich Five Pieces for Two Violins and Piano are not really by the  composer, but are instead a compilation of bits and pieces of his music arranged by his friend Avon Atovmyan, and published in 1970, with the composer's blessing. If you were to only know Shostakovich from these works, you would assume he was a pleasant popular composer writing fetching ditties and dance tunes, not the gnarly dark modernist we know from his famous works. These pieces were delightful and fun, and the rhythmic writing for two violins is artful. However, the pieces don't sound either very Russian or very reflective of the composer's output. I hope the pieces sold well, helping the cash-starved composer stay afloat. They remain popular now, as I see many performances on YouTube, often by young performers. 

The Sonata for Flute and Piano by French composer Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) is among the best solo works for flute. It sounds very Parisian-cafe in style, yet with some very difficult writing for both instruments. Flutist Silvia Carreddu and pianist Milana Chernyavska go the style just right, making the music sound light and airy, despite technical challenges. Especially before the rather dense concluding piece, it felt like a nice bracing aperitif on the Champs-Elysées.  

The closing Piano Quartet no. 2 in E flat, op. 87, composed in 1889 by Czech composer Antonin Dvořák, should have felt more climactic than it did. This is one of his numerous chamber works for strings (eg he wrote 14 string quartets), and is among the best known. However, it exemplified why, for me, most of this composer's rather conservative romantic music sounds like wannabe Brahms (a direct contemporary), but without the Brahms' harmonic and chromatic interest. Too often the composer writes pages of pleasant, well crafted music of which one cannot remember a single passage 30 minutes later. There are exceptions, of course (see the Cello Concerto or the op. 83 Piano Quintet), but the composer's default music contains neither his Czech contemporary Smetana's folk music core nor the the risk-taking of his younger contemporaries Strauss or Mahler, who were writing their early masterworks at the same time (Strauss' Death and Transfiguration and Mahler's Symphony No. 1 premiered in 1889 as did this piece). The audience in Belém loved this somewhat overstuffed work, as audiences usually do, as it effectively showcases virtuosic playing and big climaxes. As for me, my mind wandered during the performance, as it often does with this composer.