CELLOPHANE NOODLES FROM MARS? Gidon Kremer played with a fine filament of sound.
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Stravinsky, Harbison admitted, was the composer who made him want to be a musician. And even Harbison dabbled in serialism. For example, If There Be Nothing New, an almost 40-year-old setting of three relatively neglected Shakespeare sonnets about love and time and originality (Nos. 59, 123, and 102). Sonnet 123 ("No! Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change") is for piano only. Mezzo-soprano Pamela Dellal was heroic in her sung declamations; pianist Leslie Amper revealed the nuances of Harbison’s percussive chords. Then Amper and soprano Margaret Johnson gave us an archetype of atonal text setting, Anton Webern’s Songs, Opus 25 (1934), settings of three mysterious nature (?) poems by Hildegard Jone. They went by so quickly, Amper and Johnson did them twice. No one complained. The new piece was the premiere of the "revised version" of Aria (Song for the Rainy Season), a gorgeous and touching new addition to Harbison’s ongoing fascination with the poems of Elizabeth Bishop (his earlier cycle, North and South, will be sung by Janice Felty at Emmanuel Church on May 16). Aria begins with a hymn-like setting of Bishop’s posthumously published love poem "Close, close all night." That’s followed by her 60-line poem about the house in Brazil she lived in with her lover, Lota de Macedo Soares, and countless uninvited but not unwelcome creatures: membership of silver fish, mouse, bookworms, big moths; with a wall for the mildew’s ignorant map . . . maculate, cherished, rejoice! For a later era will differ. It’s Bishop’s darkest foreboding of the tragedy that will follow when this effulgent "rainy season" inevitably dries up, as it eventually did for her. The piece ends with a haunting memory of the opening love hymn for the quintet of piano (Amper) and winds (Peggy Pearson, Bruce Creditor, Thomas Stephenson, and Neil DeLand). Soprano Kendra Colton was Bishop’s restrained but eloquent voice; Craig Smith conducted the superb ensemble. This may be Harbison’s most unashamedly romantic piece of vocal writing. I loved it. AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL has been lucky in having such extraordinary Boston-area musicians as violinist Beyla Keyes, cellist Rhonda Rider, and pianist Lois Shapiro among the performers for its annual spring benefit concert. But this was the first spring these three appeared together in their current configuration: the super-trio Triple Helix, whose base of operations is Wellesley College. It was nice to have them closer to town, in Cambridge, where they filled Longy School’s Pickman Hall. For Amnesty, Triple Helix presented "Music of Despair, Music of Hope," which included works by Dmitri Shostakovich, who endured the repression of Stalin, and Bright Sheng, who had to endure the Red Chinese Cultural Revolution before he could emigrate to the US. Sheng’s Four Movements for Piano Trio (1990) eloquently blends Western instruments with the sounds of Chinese folk instruments. These short and efficient movements are a touching evocation of lost innocence. The music is slippery — is it the violin or the cello that sounds like a Chinese flute? Melodic lines slide between familiar tones. It’s the plucked piano strings that sound like an ancient stringed instrument. The piece is never gimmicky. Unlike Nyman’s work, these short movements were centered in real feeling, and the playing brought out all its nostalgic longing. Triple Helix then offered up a new treat — Shostakovich’s recently discovered Trio No. 1 in C-minor, Opus 8, a single-movement piece he composed in 1923, when he was only 17. As with the Britten Double Concerto, it’s amazing how many of the qualities one thinks of as belonging to Shostakovich were already there: the darkly satiric jauntiness, the swooning Mahlerian long melodic line, the general edginess and refusal to rest in complacency. The big piece of the first half was Beethoven’s Ghost Trio, one of his greatest chamber works. Not exactly music of hope or despair, its center lies in its chilling slow movement, Largo assai ed espressivo. Triple Helix’s best qualities are probably most clearly measurable in a classical piece: the great elasticity of phrasing and the rhythmic play that never sacrifice precision or beauty of tone or the contours of the melody; the exuberance that somehow stays within the borders of refinement and taste; the musical conviction. The last-movement Presto overflowed with delightful surprises — a relief after the intensity of uncertainty in the slow movement. The evening ended with a powerful and poignant performance of one of Shostakovich’s masterpieces, his Piano Trio No. 2, in E minor, from 1944, which fulfills all the promise of that early First Trio. It begins with a cello tune in high harmonics, another ghostly calling up of some lost past. After a lively (or is it ominous?) folk dance and a tortured slow movement, pizzicato strings in the finale suggest the minor-key tunes and dance rhythms of Jewish klezmer music. But these morph into a terrifying death march, and the two contradictory elements become increasingly hard to separate, until they end in pure elegy. A fitting conclusion for an evening devoted to helping mobilize people against the world’s juggernaut of injustices.
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