Music

Neave Trio

Dad was a chamber music fiend. Central Michigan didn’t pull enough acts north, then or later, so he and Mom were always going down to concerts at the Wharton Center in Lansing. Back then that was a good 70-75 minute drive each way, and finding a babysitter for me. Above the stairs in their home hangs Scott McKowen’s marvelous poster from the 1989 “Beethoven Quartet Cycle” performance series by the Juilliard String Quartet. The poster features a baleful Beethoven riding a wooden bicycle, sheets of a score fluttering away.

I didn’t have to go so far tonight. The Williams Center for the Arts is on Lafayette’s campus and within walking distance if I felt like tackling the hill (which I didn’t). Visiting tonight was the Neave Trio: Anna Williams on violin, Mikhail Veselov on cello, and Eri Nakamura on piano.

I’m strictly an amateur when it comes to classical music appreciation. The well-intentioned attempt by my parents to have me learn the cello ended in failure. I can’t read music nor carry a tune. I enjoy and find meaning in the experience while feeling that I lack the vocabulary to describe what I’m enjoying. No matter.

Four pieces on the program tonight:

  1. Samuel Coleridge Taylor - Five Negro Melodies for Piano Trio
  2. Kirk O’Riordan - Cadenza for Piano Trio
  3. Maurice Ravel - Piano Trio for A minor
  4. Astor Piazzolla - Otoño Porteño from Estaciones Porteñas

I wasn’t familiar with Coleridge Taylor, and in fact mistook him for his more famous namesake. Coleridge Taylor was mixed English-Krio birth and active in the Edwardian period. He did, apparently, once set “Kubla Khan” to music.

Anna Williams did something a little unusual when introducing the Ravel piece. She reminded us that Ravel composed it in five weeks, as World War I broke out and Ravel was preparing to enlist.[1] I immediately thought of Edmund Stillman’s haunting prologue to the American Heritage’s history of the First World War.[2] In nine pages, Stillman surveys Europe in the months before disaster. Appropriately, he begins and ends in Sarajevo. This is how his text finishes:

So the earth turned. The friendly stars marched in their courses. At three o’clock in the morning, New York time, the dancers tangoed at Coney Island’s Castle Summer House; at Brighton Beach, they tangoed in the sand. Eventually they went home to sleep. Five thousand miles away in the Balkans an old imam prayed and construed the daily lesson–the terrible admonitory words of the Koran speaking of the judgment of God on usurpers:

“How many a generation have we destroyed before these ones came into the country–generations so mighty that they overran the lands? And had they any place of refuge when my judgment came?”

At ten o’clock in the morning, Sarajevo time, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand stepped into his waiting motorcar.

And as Leon Trotsky would put it later, “History had already poised its gigantic soldier’s boot over the antheap.” An age was about to end.

I don’t often contextualize classical music by time and space, but I’m going to do it more often. I wouldn’t describe Ravel’s Piano Trio as apocalyptic,[3] but I was conscious of emotions boiling under the surface.

The trio performed Astor Piazzolla as an encore at the end of the program. Estaciones Porteñas, or The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, is a set of four tango pieces. The trio performed Otoño Porteño, or “Autumn.” A distinguishing feature, unique in my experience, is that Piazzolla inserted discordant sounds, played by the violin, to capture the insects that are prominent in Buenos Aires at that time of year. A somewhat wild piece and a wonderful (and unexpected) end to the evening.

  1. Ravel was 39 at the time of the July Crisis, well above the normal age for military service. After several failed attempts, he joined an artillery regiment as truck driver in 1915. ↩︎

  2. S. L. A. Marshall wrote the main text. It’s heterodox in places and opinionated throughout; I’d sooner read it than any other major overview. Make sure you get the big hardcover edition with the full-page maps. ↩︎

  3. Compare Arthur Conan Doyle’s opening to His Last Bow: “It was nine o’clock at night upon the second of August—the most terrible August in the history of the world. One might have thought already that God’s curse hung heavy over a degenerate world…” Admittedly, a warm night in August can do that to a man. ↩︎