Arensky gets rare hearing at Menlo
The day is coming, or so I hope, when the chamber music of Anton Arensky takes its proper place in our concert life. This is music that almost never gets performed, and yet every time a piece of Arensky’s surfaces it turns out to be a small masterpiece of inventiveness, expressivity and grace.
It happened again on Saturday, July 21, during a concert at the Music@Menlo Chamber Festival devoted to music from the Russian urban hub of St. Petersburg (or, for a relevant interlude, Leningrad). In a vivacious rendition at the Center for the Performing Arts at Menlo-Atherton, Arensky’s
Music@Menlo: Through Saturday, Aug. 4. $62-$72. Center for the Performing Arts, 555 Middlefield Road, Atherton. 650-3302030. www.musicatmenlo.org
String Quartet No. 2 from 1894 revealed itself as a work that should be in regular rotation.
Even to call it simply a string quartet is to conceal some of the piece’s startling ingenuity. Yes, it’s for four stringed instruments — but in place of the usual lineup (two violins, viola, cello) Arensky calls for two cellos and a lone violin.
It’s not an instrumental configuration I’ve ever encountered before, although music
history mavens are encouraged to weigh in with other examples if there are any. And although the change in instrumentation might not seem all that consequential, it actually has a big effect throughout.
The difference is a matter of both textural weight — the ensemble produces a wonderfully bottom-heavy, pearshaped sound — and also of musical rhetoric. It means that the violin is out there all alone in the lead role, declaiming its melodies with no one else to trade ideas with; the result smacks faintly of concerto writing.
Arensky, with quiet brilliance, exploits all these new possibilities in music that is otherwise not noticeably revolutionary. The opening movement has a somber, dark-hued undercurrent, and a tendency to address the harmonic implications of the material rather than its melodic shapes, and even the central movement — a set of variations on a theme of Tchaikovsky — sits very low in the saddle. Only in the brisk finale does the composer let things spring out into a brighter dimension.
Of course, this is a harder piece to program than a conventional string quartet, if only because you can’t entrust it to a standard ensemble. But like so much of Arensky’s music, it deserves to be championed, and Saturday’s ensemble — violinist Arnaud Sussmann, violist Paul Neubauer and cellists David Requiro and David Finckel — gave it a warm and eloquent rendition.
The rest of the program, most of which sounded more ingratiating and lightweight by comparison, served as a reminder of how much of Russian music history involved a negotiation with the dominant European traditions of Vienna and Paris. Glinka’s marvelous “Trio pathétique” from 1832 — in a vivacious performance by clarinetist Jose Franch-Ballester, bassoon Peter Kolkay and pianist Michael Brown — sounded like a winsome gloss on Schubert or late Beethoven, created with a terse directness that sounded distinctive.
Balakirev’s Octet for Winds, Strings and Piano, Op. 3, conjured up plenty of ruckus without much substance, and the remainder of the evening was devoted to music of Shostakovich. First came a recently rediscovered Impromptu for Viola and Piano — 90 seconds’ worth of melody that was over as soon as it began — and then a robust, emotionally detailed account of excerpts from the song cycle “From Jewish Folk Poetry,” done with probing intensity by soprano Lyubov Petrova, contralto Sara Couden and tenor Kang Wang.