The Oregonian (Portland, Oregon)
February 2, 2005 Wednesday
SUNRISE EDITION
MUSIC REVIEW TRIO MAKES IT OFFICIAL, GIVING INTIMATE, SKILLFUL
PERFORMANCE
by DAVID STABLER – The Oregonian
Monday’s concert by Chamber Music Northwest at Kaul Auditorium was
both a reunion and a debut. The performers — David Shifrin, Ani
Kavafian and Andre-Michel Schub — have played together for decades,
but this concert was their debut as an official trio.
Known as the Kavafian-Schub-Shifrin Trio (KSS for short), they
brought both formidable skill and easy intimacy to four works:
Mozart’s “Kegelstatt” Trio, Robert Schumann’s “Fairy Tale Stories,”
Aram Khachaturian’s folk-filled Trio in G Minor and Bela Bartok’s
brilliant and robust “Contrasts.”
Such a program showed considerable range within the relatively small
repertoire for piano, clarinet and violin (and viola, as Kavafian
demonstrated).
How fitting that Mozart wrote his “Kegelstatt” Trio for friends, the
clarinet virtuoso Anton Stadler and his favorite piano student
Franzisca von Jacquin. Mozart himself played the viola. Shifrin,
Kavafian and Schub caught the work’s graciousness with small-scale
tone and effortless passing back and forth of the ornaments in the
first movement.
The only drawback was Schub’s tendency to play ahead of the beat,
robbing some of the music’s poise.
Schumann’s “Fairy Tale Stories” is a strange suite of pieces,
intermittently lyrical and vigorous. In texture and design it doesn’t
come up to the imaginative level of his early “fantasy” music (the
piano suite “Fantasiestcke,” for example), but the players gave warm
and vivid performances.
We rarely hear Khachaturian’s chamber music — he wrote mostly
concertos and orchestral works; anybody hear of the “Sabre Dance”? —
but the G Minor Trio is memorable for its tangy Armenian flavor.
Colorful and quixotic, it evokes East European folk music, with
snappy rhythms, modal scales and expressive ornamentation.
Apart from some heavy-handed chords from Schub that drowned out his
colleagues, the players gave a vibrant, exciting performance.
As Shifrin marks his 25th season as artistic director of Chamber
Music Northwest, it seemed appropriate that he play one of his
signature pieces: Bartok’s “Contrasts.” Longtime fans will fondly
recall previous performances he’s given of this terrific piece, but
still, Monday’s reprise sounded as fresh as ever.
In the first movement, a short introduction leads to a wild
18th-century Hungarian recruiting dance in which an army officer
prances about in order to entice young men into service. Shifrin took
off in the cadenza that ends the movement, exploiting the brilliant
run up the scale that ends with a piercing shout.
Kavafian switched to a second, deliberately mistuned violin for the
third movement as the players whirled through the irregular rhythms.
It was an exhilarating finish, and a great beginning to a new chapter
of chamber music.