January 21, 2024
Ahavath Achim Synagogue
Atlanta, GA – USA
“Tributes from France”
Todd Skitch, flute; Elizabeth Tiscione, oboe; Jesse McCandless, claronet; Anthony Georgeson, bassoon; Susan Welty, horn; Helen Hwaya Kim, violin, Charae Kreuger, cello; Elizabeth Pridgen, piano.
Maurice RAVEL: Le Tombeau de Couperin
Francis POULENC: Sextet for Wind Quintet and Piano
Maurice RAVEL: Piano Trio in C Minor
Jon Ciliberto | 26 JAN 2024
The large audience at Ahavath Achim Synagogue on January 21, 2024, for the Atlanta Chamber Players’ all-French program speaks well of the community’s interest in chamber music in a lovely setting. Although frigid outside, the bright sunlight brought a perfect light into the Sanctuary.
Having heard a larger ensemble, the Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, perform there, I was curious to hear how a chamber group sounded: in this case, a trio, a wind quintet, and a sextet (the quintet plus piano).
The performers were at ground level, not elevated on the Sanctuary’s platform because of the difficulty in placing the piano there. Thus tucked in, actually surrounded by the audience, the wind ensemble presented on a fairly concentrated, perhaps slightly muted sonic profile — a useful one, I think, for chamber music, and Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin suite was intended to evoke baroque chamber music. While I didn’t perceive much of a stereo field from where I was sitting, and the horn and bassoon and their lower ends lacked punch, the music itself was extremely pleasant to the ear’s comprehension, and pleasingly intimate. Thus, the music was not lost in space but laid before me like a jewel box, easy to examine and feel a part of.
The quintet’s playing was lithe and focused, bringing out the works fascinating harmonic choices. I particularly enjoyed the tension provided by the flute in the second movement and the execution of the gently rolling rhythm by the group there. Perhaps personal preference, but the quintet setting of this piece seems better able to achieve Ravel’s goals than his original solo piano or later orchestra versions.
The “Tombeau” is a past and present piece, structurally reaching back to Couperin’s day, but thematically dedicated to the memory of four of the composer’s friends, each of whom died fighting in the First World War. (Ravel himself volunteered, at age 40, finishing up the Piano Trio just prior to shipping out.)
This willingness to combine widely separate ideas in one work speaks of the times in which Ravel worked and his individual compositional mindset, although his tendency to move between different modes in a single work brought Ravel criticism as lacking gravitas.
I don’t see artists who work in a range of voices as “light” simply because their style is not monolithic. Ravel wrote: “I have never limited myself to a ‘Ravel’ style. When I create a new way of expressing myself, I leave it to others. They may throw my works back at me, but I know that a conscious artist is always right. I say conscious and not sincere, because in the latter word there is something humiliating. And artist cannot be sincere. Falsehood, taken as the the power of illusion, is the only superiority of man over animals; and when it can claim to be art, it is the only superiority of the artist over other men.”
Ravel expresses a distinctly 20th-century view: that every text is a falsehood, or at least an illusion — far removed from the Classical idea of fixed ideas in the firmament that the composer draws down in mathematical harmonic forms.
Poulenc’s Sextet is somewhat bizarre, as was his way, a combination of show tunes and romance, satire and comedy. I did appreciate the careful and artful way the group resolved the second movement on a final A♭ minor chord, which felt perfectly balanced with an early bit of dissonance (A, G♯, D, F) that concluded a section.
Following this work, Ravel’s Piano Trio offered both an entirely different sonic palette and also a series of technical and musical challenges deftly met by Helen Hwaya Kim (violin), Elizaeth Pridgen (piano), and Charae Kreuger (cello). Here, the floor setting somewhat obscured the cello’s upper register from my ears, and thus, some of the careful interplay between the strings was lost on me.
The musicians danced through the work’s second movement, even with its striking rhythms and complex metrical variety (its title refers to a Malaysian verse form popular with French poets Verlaine and Baudelaire). Regarding this section, in an email following the performance, Ms. Kim noted: “The mixed meters in the second Movement are absolutely dizzying. It is very much like an impressionist painting, and the control that each player must have is unlike any other piano trio.”
Likely, it is the work’s daunting technical challenge that led to a remark overheard immediately after: “That was brave.”
The performance of this Trio was masterful and detailed, capturing and focusing the entire audience, I felt, through its range of textures and sonorities, as well as in sweeping, unreserved emotional playing. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Atlanta Chamber Players: atlantachamberplayers.com
- Ahavath Achim Synagogue: aasynagogue.org
Read more by Jon Ciliberto.
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