Of Beethoven, Bartók, Berg... and baseball

by CMNW guest blogger Bob King

In my previous post I talked about my dream of small form classical concerts in relaxed, night club-type environments. This final Protégé Project concert (7/18) at The Woods reminded me of the other important element of the idea—capturing that elusive, younger 20’s and 30’s audience. I actually wrote some of this during the performance from the back of the hall (an interesting side benefit of this kind of venue) and looking out I would guess that at least a third of the attendance were in the late 20s through early 40s. If I may borrow the phrase from Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, "build it and they will come;" this younger audience attraction is part of what I presumed would happen if this great music were performed where they are familiar with the milieu if not the exact location. I absolutely do think this takes a bit of an intimidation and/or resistance factor down a few notches for people who may never have been to a chamber music concert before. And I think they will find, possibly to their surprise, that live music is great whether it's Curtis Salgado singing the blues, U2, a local jazz artist, or, in this case, Beethoven, Bartók and Berg chamber pieces played by a host of highly dedicated twenty-something rising stars of the classical world. In Kinsella's book, "they" were long forgotten ghosts of ball players looking for one more chance to play baseball together; in a way that imagery fits here. These protégés are also looking for venues to play in, an opportunity to share their love of the music, an invocation of magic if you will allow it.

One side benefit for us in the audience derives, at least somewhat, from theses young artists' relative exposure in their field. It's been my pleasure over the past weeks to get to know the artists that make up the Atria Trio, Sospiro Winds and finally the Jasper String Quartet. This has been possible, in part, because they have all stayed in Portland since their arrival over the four- week duration of the series, thereby also giving us the opportunity to hear them play in the other CMNW Summer Festival concerts. If I were writing about the Emerson Quartet, or the Takács Quartet, they would surely have had only a few days in town before other concert obligations intervened. Of course, there is no doubt that in the coming years these tremendous talents will have that same pleasant dilemma, trading less travel for more work. And we will be introduced to other dedicated rising stars, but I know they would agree that their weeks in Portland have been good and they also have enjoyed getting to know some of their audience here over these weeks.

This last concert of this year’s Protégé series, in part because the artists were still all here then, was somewhat of an "all-star" concert. They even brought in one of their favorite sound engineers from NY, David Merrill, who I can tell you is a major baseball fan (I think this is the end of my little baseball theme). In any case, the groups have been able to program some of their favorite pieces, rather than conforming to a particular theme or compositional period. It would be hard to pick out a favorite work from the concert. All the performances were top shelf, beginning with Beethoven's second Cello Sonata, played by Hyeyeon Park and Aleksey Klyushnik. I enjoyed Aleksiy's story about Beethoven enthusiastically hearing the piece played on a bass, thus heading off any audience protests both then and now. This was followed by a much lighter but equally well-executed selection of Bartók violin duos performed by Portland native Rebecca Anderson and the violinist third of the Atria Ensemble, Sunmi Chang. The crowd favorite of the night may have been the “Opus Zoo for Wind Quintet” by Luciano Berio. Sospiro Winds, it turns out, are a full service musical theatre group, excepting maybe animal costumes. While the barnyard cast of characters in this four movement, modern, but neo-classically based, suite seems at first to remind one of Peter and the Wolf, the undercurrent of the horrors of war and violent, abrupt death make this no children’s tale. After the break, the final piece of the Protégé series was a beautiful performance by the Jasper String Quartet of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite. This work offers fascinating avenues of study, in both musical and biographical directions. It is written more or less entirely in twelve-tone technique and in sonata form over six movements—it’s difficult but fun to follow the sonata form due to the nature of twelve tone structure where everything ends up sounding like development. Programmatically the Lyric Suite quotes—and was dedicated to—von Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony; but there is much, much more underlying this wonderful piece. Even if you have not heard this work, I would direct you to this 2003 NY Times article, by Reed College’s David Schiff, from which I will just briefly quote to tease you into it: “In 1977, hints in the score and from Berg's intimate circle led Mr. Perle to a copy of the score that Berg had given to his mistress, Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, whom he had met on a visit to Prague in 1925. In Fuchs-Robettin's copy, Berg explained in detail how the work's arcane procedures symbolized their love, in a coded form made necessary by the fact that both were married.”