Blair Brass Quintet
Oct. 27 at Ingram Hall
Blair String Quartet
Nov. 1 at Ingram Hall
The Blair School’s handsome new Ingram Hall, dedicated in 2001, is right now the best acoustic venue for classical music in Music City. In this 600-seat space, as in no other Nashville room of any size, what performers deliver is what listeners hear. Already the hall has hosted several gold-standard concerts, along with others that, though less than ideal, were memorable. Last week, two of Blair’s own faculty ensembles demonstrated again why this space is a civic treasure. On Monday evening, a newly reborn Blair Brass Quintet performed for the first time since 1998. Last Saturday evening, the long-lived Blair String Quartet played its first concert of the new season.
Just announcing the quintet’s rebirth quickened anticipation. Through recordings by the Canadian Brass and the Empire Brass, among others, the clarion brilliance of this instrumental genre has become well known. But since the genre has been recognized only since the 1950s, most repertory is transcribed from other music—for organ or piano or strings. And because brass players, like singers, have to breathe, a Bach organ fugue transcribed for brass is taken at a faster tempo than organists use. This is exciting in itself, even as it renews the music when next heard on the organ. During the last half-century, however, a lot of noteworthy music has been composed for brass quintet.
All five members of Blair’s reconstituted brass quintet are accomplished professionals—Jeff Bailey and Allan Cox (trumpets), Lawrence Borden (trombone), Leslie Norton (French horn) and Gilbert Long (tuba). All except Cox are also members of the Nashville Symphony. The program the quintet played last Saturday reached from Josquin des Pres (c. 1445-1521) through J.S. Bach down to a jaunty selection composed by Anthony Plog in 1991. It also included a transcribed set of Renaissance English dances, for which the quintet were joined by Nashville Symphony percussionist Bill Wiggins. From first to last, the program was technically formidable and the individual musicianship was consistently first-rate.
The seven selections might be sorted into two baskets—Bach-and-before transcriptions and late 20th century originals, including four recent compositions. All of the pieces included some Josquin-like counterpoint and yet shared a contemporary percussive idiom, marked by lots of brazen quick-tongued shots—short, bright staccato chords or tones—punctuating complex rhythmic textures and swarming dissonances.
On balance, the concert was a blazing success, but it wasn’t as good as coming evenings will be. Though these are superb musicians, this was their inaugural concert, and the ensemble will get tighter as they play together more. They may also want to re-think their programming, for as brilliant as it was, Saturday’s performance suffered from a sameness of idiom; it was almost as if one composer had written all of the material in slightly different styles. Some lovely unhurried melodies appeared—most marvelously perhaps in the tuba’s high register—but brassy bravura too soon overwhelmed them.
Saturday evening’s Blair String Quartet concert was the first of two that will focus on Beethoven and Brahms; the second is scheduled for next March. This one paired the early Beethoven Quartet in A Major, Op. 18, No. 5, from the same period as the composer’s first symphony, with a mature quartet by Brahms, the Op. 51, No. 1. Between these two came a piano quintet by Dmitri Shostakovich, his Op. 57. Dmitri in the middle delivered the evening’s diadem.
The Beethoven sounded surprisingly fresh, in no way foreshadowing the obsessive father of the cacophonous late quartets. The composer brought to life by Christian Teal and Cornelia Heard (violins), John Kochanowski (viola) and Felix Wang (cello) was a witty playful Beethoven—Ludwig van Haydn, as it were. Particularly memorable was the lyrical cello part scored into the quartet’s leisurely third movement.
Beethoven published 15 complete quartets, plus a single-movement Great Fugue. Brahms, in a long prolific career during which he saw himself always in Beethoven’s shadow, published only three, discarding more than 20 string quartets before he published any. This concert’s finale was the first of those, completed in 1873 when Brahms was 40. Brahms cast it in C minor, which he called “Beethoven’s key.” His sonorities, however, were signature Brahms.
But neither Beethoven nor Brahms claimed the evening’s crown. That goes to Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G minor, composed for four of his Russian friends—the “Beethoven Quartet”—who had asked him to write something they could play together. Shostakovich himself was the pianist for the Moscow world premiere in 1940; in Saturday’s realization, the pianist was Amy Dorfman.
In important ways, the Shostakovich quintet is closer to Brahms than to any Beethoven, but especially to early Beethoven. It is in five movements—Prelude, Fugue, Scherzo, Intermezzo and Finale—opening with what critic David Gutman calls “an archaic, declamatory gesture from the piano.” Stirring memories of Brahms, this gesture establishes the music’s seminal motive: Everything grows out of that.
The five movements have little to connect them except the seed out of which they grew, the strong, audacious Prelude followed by one of music’s great fugues. Marked adagio, the Fugue begins with a pianissimo solo first violin spinning out the seed-theme. The second violin takes it up, then the cello, then the viola, making delicate embroidery. Finally, the piano joins in, playing low bass octaves, and the tension builds, threatening to rupture the tight structural order that never quite gives way.
The Scherzo follows, a raucous bawdy joke that wanders through what sounds like a Spanish bodega as it makes its way to a dignified diatonic Intermezzo. This introduces some brief seriousness before surrendering the floor to a sportive Finale where the piano behaves like a teen cavorting among exuberant strings. About halfway through the movement, the piano reprises a scrap of declamatory Prelude, destabilizing the music so that it sort of peters out, ending on an ambiguous smile and wink.
The Shostakovich distilled the entire evening into “a terrible beauty,” in Yeats’ phrase—the young Beethoven on the way to the prison of his own deafness, and one of his musical scions, Brahms, unique in his era in imposing classical rigor on tremendous emotional force. Placed between these two, and realized by these players in Ingram Hall, Shostakovich made old things new.
Comments (0)