Chamber Music Monterey Bay presents Music from Copland House at Sunset Center
By Jordi Faxon
November 4, 2018
On Saturday, November 3rd, we were treated to a truly spiritual and breathtaking performance by Music from Copland House. The concert contained four works spanning neo-romanticism to more contemporary styles, all with their own entrancing narratives and emotional undertones, and all referencing the principal theme of the night’s concert — A Journey. The members of the ensemble, violinist Curtis Macomber, cellist Alexis Pia Gerlach and pianist Michael Boriskin, were playing Shostakovich’s very first Piano Trio in C Minor and Fauré’s very last Piano Trio in D Minor, as well as two commissioned works where clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein was added to the mix: one by Chamber Music Monterey Bay (Puts’ Living Frescoes) and one by Music from Copland House (Lam’s Fragrance of the Sea).
Dmitri Shostakovich’s Trio No. 1 opened the concert, and as pre-concert-lecturer Kai Christiansen said, it was written when the composer was only 16 years old and studying at the Petrograd Conservatory. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis and while at the sanatorium, his heart was stolen by a woman to whom this piece ended up being dedicated, giving the motive for the piece’s first title: Poème.
It began in a mood that’s well-familiar and expected from Shostakovich: dark, somber, and subdued. As momentum gathers and accumulates from its dark origin, more harsh dissonances and rhythmic ideas develop. At the midway point in the piece, the peak of vulgar and anarchistic energy, a beautiful cantabile emerges from the cello accompanied by swaying eighth-notes from the piano, a sound unimaginably far from Shostakovich’s more expected territory. The lovesickness becomes tormented after enough repetition, some of the somber themes from the beginning get wound up with the heart-wrenching and passionate melody. A marriage of the sentimental and the grotesque is established and elaborated upon as motifs are turned on their head until a finale is absurdly brought together with the piece ending at a screeching halt.