The “Kreutzer” and Dvořák’s Romance on Second Sunday

Roger Wilkie and Robert Thies welcomed by the audience at Rolling Hills United Methodist Church.

REVIEW

Roger Wilkie and Robert Thies, Second Sundays at Two, Rolling Hills United Methodist Church

BARBARA GLAZER, Guest Reviewer

Roger Wilkie and Robert Thies.

After his performance with pianist Robert Thies of the Romance in F Minor, Op. 11, by Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904), violinist Roger Wilkie delivered some excellent comments on the program, noting that this first selection had been based on the slow movement of Dvořák’s String Quartet No. 5 in F minor (1873).

It was first performed in 1877 as a violin/orchestral piece by Prague’s Provisional Theater Orchestra in their annual concert. Dvořák’s version for piano and violin, played here, was revised from the orchestral piece and dedicated to violinist František Ondříček (1857-1922) but was never played in public during the composer's lifetime.

Dvořák in 1879.

It is infused with gorgeous melodies, yet most unusually for a Romance is written in Classical sonata form, merging with a Slavic folk style. It is in compound duple meter (two beats per measure, each beat divided into three smaller parts) which produces a sort of swaying sound, with a dreamy quality of reverie or melancholy—perhaps reflective of the deaths of three of Dvořák’s children during these years: one in infancy, another from accidental poisoning, and the third from smallpox.

I loved the Thies/Wilkie performance: the beautiful melodies played with impeccable lyrical taste and phrasing and superb technical prowess: one would never discern from Wilkie's fluid account how difficult the key of F minor is for a violinist.

George Bridgetower.

And then came the Beethoven (1770-1827) Kreutzer Sonata (Violin Sonata in A Major, Op. 47, 1803). The piece was originally written for and played by his African-European violinist friend George Bridgetower (1778-1860), but after they had a falling out (over Bridgetower's remark about the morals of a woman Beethoven admired), Beethoven rededicated the work to the virtuoso violinist Rodolphe Keutzer (1766-1831), who as noted in Wilkie’s remarks never played the composition, calling it "unintelligible."

The Kreutzer presents an array of difficulties: its length (about 40 minutes), its technical demands on both instrumentalists, and its transitional style between late Classicism and Romanticism. In structure and forms it is Classical with a sonata-form first movement, a kind of rondo in the last, and the middle movement a set of five variations—a forte of Beethoven. But, adumbrating the Romantic movement, it should be played with drama, high energy, and in the designated “concertante style”—the instruments being co-equals, the piano never an accompanist, but two virtuoso instrumentalists playing as if in a mini- concerto.

Title-page of the first edition of the Kreutzer Sonata, noting that it was
written "in uno stile molto concertante come d’un concerto.”

The speed of the last movement also poses difficulties: like the later Hammerklavier piano sonata (No. 29, 1817), the speed must not obscure the music—the compositional brilliance which is often difficult to hear for the speed and technical fireworks. In many respects this performance by Thies and Wilkie, technically sound, was very “classical,” and I think it just needed to be punched up dramatically—with the earthy, raw, almost sexual romantic element that so incensed Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), and inspired him to write his novella The Kreutzer Sonata (1889).

Sonya and Leo Tolstoy.

Tolstoy must have felt a taboo breached, as audiences did much later hearing Stravinsky's savagery in The Rite of Spring (1913). Tolstoy's novella is the first-person narrative of a husband who hires a violinist to accompany his wife, a pianist and, upon hearing their impassioned performance, is aroused with suspicion regarding their relationship and inflamed with sexual jealousy. The two musicians (never really lovers, never caught en flagrante) are seated at a table talking when the enraged husband, senseless from jealousy, stabs his wife to death.

Tolstoy’s novella is an argument for sexual abstinence to avoid our “swinish,” “animalistic” proclivities which hinder the attainment of humanity and cause us such agony, and strife. His wife Sonya (Sophia) penned two rebuttal novellas (Whose Fault, 1891-94; Song Without Words, 1898, both unpublished during her lifetime), citing her husband as insensitive, unfeeling, and growing more and more ascetic and combative in a stormy marriage once marked by mutual love (and 13 children): Tolstoy did leave home in 1910, ending their marriage.

The Kreutzer Sonata by Rene Xavier Prinet.

The cultural links continue: upon reading Tolstoy's novella, Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) composed his String Quartet No. 1 (1923), a work depicting psychological drama and passion, ending in a dramatic rejection and release.

In 1901 the artist Rene Xavier Prinet (1861-1946), had painted The Kreutzer Sonata: a beautifully dressed pianist, her fingers still touching the keyboard as she stands to receive an impassioned kiss from her violinist lover—an image that in 1932 (and for years) was used in the perfume advertisement for "Tabu, the Forbidden Fragrance."

It's no wonder that impassioned music, in fact all types of music, have sometimes been censored by governments or banned outright by religious sects. Beethoven is said to have opined that "to play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable." His Kreutzer Sonata may be a transitional composition as noted, but it needs to feel less Classical and more Romantic, more earthy, more impassioned, more fiery, if we are to understand its cultural effects and as we hear in the most superb performances: Augustine Hadelich/Orion Wiess and Patricia Kopatchinskaja/Fazil Say, and close behind: Gidon Kremer/Martha Argerich.

In the Classical Crossroads recital we heard, Robert Thies on piano was outstanding, but I felt Roger Wilkie needed to punch it up—even his body stance was so collected and straight, so classical—so that overall, this good performance left me hungry for a more impassioned account. I have viewed this concert on the usual excellent Vimeo video several times, and have listened to many other performances. As a non-professional I have felt hesitant to write my impression, which also accounts for my delay in contributing this review.

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Images: The performers: Classical Crossroads, inc.; Dvořák, Bridgetower, Kreutzer title-page, the Tolstoys, The Kreutzer Sonata: Wikimedia Commons.

A Gorgeous Season Opener for Classical Interludes

Trio Sol: l-r Veronika Manchur (violin), Colin McDearman (piano), Joseph Kim (cello).

REVIEW

Trio Sol, Classical Interludes, First Lutheran Church, Torrance

BARBARA GLAZER, Guest Reviewer

Classical Crossroads Inc., one of Southern California South Bay’s leading promoters of free-admission chamber music concerts, each season presents two series: “Classical Interludes” on the first Saturday afternoon of each month at First Lutheran Church & School in Torrance, and “Second Sundays at Two”—on the second Sunday afternoon of the month, as the name implies—at Rolling Hills United Methodist Church in Rolling Hills Estates.

Barbara Glazer, local Rancho Palos Verdes resident but global concert attendee and lifelong classical music student, writes: “The Trio Sol's concert—with Colin McDearman on piano, Veronika Manchur on violin, and Joseph Kim on cello—opened Classical Crossroads’ 2025-26 Classical Interludes series on a gorgeous high note which I have enjoyed twice so far (as if in the best house seat) by viewing the excellent Vimeo video. In a masterful performance of a program of well-paired and demanding compositions, the members of the Trio displayed their superb individual technical and lyrical skills, and their ability to meld as one voice.

"The opening piece, Lost Tango (2002) by the Ukrainian pianist/composer Volodymyr Vynnytsky was, according to his wife and cellist Natalia Khoma, so named as an “in joke” because he contended that he had "found it"—being a reinvention of the dance by fusing the historically-suppressed, traditional, elegant Spanish tango with an eastern, coarse, rough-edged dance rhythm with some interesting dissonant harmonies. One could hear dumky-like echoes of Dvořák's dances, with the sharp abrupt changes in tempo and accents, and references to eastern folk tunes. As a folk dancer, and someone with Ukrainian roots, this piece, and the Trio's expert performance, brought a smile to my face, a delight to my ears, and the desire to dance again (if only possible now!).

Colin McDearman.

Next was the Prelude No. 1 in G-Sharp Minor, composed and brilliantly performed by the Trio's pianist, Colin McDearman, based on his love poem to his fiancé. This was a firework display of technical prowess while retaining deep emotionalism, speaking of passion, inspiration, admiration, and joy.

Originally preludes were short pieces that introduced a larger work, but in the hands of Chopin in particular, and others, became stand-alone works that explored a specific mood or activity. McDearman's Prelude No. 1 has aspects of both: while it is a passionate, explosive, ecstatic expression of love, the ending lacks the expected resolution so that it feels like an introduction to the next stage—culminating perhaps in Prelude No. 2, the marriage?

Prelude No. 1 has some very difficult fingering, especially for the fourth finger, and allows McDearman to display his keyboard artistry, but the music, the harmonies are not lost: in particular, the resolution of one brief harmonic wedge was exquisite. Like a shy suitor, McDearman was so very modest, so reserved in acknowledging the audience's enthusiastic appreciation—leaving the music to speak for him. A total success.

Antonin Dvořák's Piano Trio No. 4 in E minor, Op. 90, B. 166 “Dumky” (1891) exquisitely concluded this outstanding concert. Dumky is the plural form of dumka, a Ukrainian word for a thought or an idea; in music it is expressed as a lament in an epic melancholic ballad of a people held in bondage, struggling for nationhood—and for me, with non-Slavic paternal Ukrainian roots, the inclusion of the Dumky Trio in the program felt like a tribute to the current Ukrainian nation bravely fighting yet another attempt to wipe it off the map.

Dvořák in New York, 1893.

The dumky ballads are said to have roots in the songs of wandering Cossack bards, accompanied by a lute (kobza), telling of their comrades’ resistance to foreign overlords. The music is characterized by slow, pensive, melancholic sections with abrupt changes to faster sections of joy and exuberance. This reflects the mood shifts in the Slavic sensibility, and therefore greatly appealed to the Bohemian Dvořák (1841-1904), and other Slavic composers.

The Dumky Trio was premiered in Prague (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) to great success in 1891 with Dvořák on the piano, and I learned at a concert in Brno (his birthplace) that it was repeated over 40 times in a tour of Moravia and Bohemia before the composer left for America in 1892. To the great delight of my Czech guide, I mentioned that I knew why Dvořák had gone there: to assume directorship of the National Conservatory of Music of America in NYC (1892) where he changed American classical music. Influenced by Black composers to whom he awarded music scholarships, Dvořák instructed American classical composers to use American folk music, especially Black folk music in their work, as he had used Bohemian and eastern folk tunes in his.

Veronika Manchur.

The Dumky has six movements, but to understand the mood and tempo changes within each of them, all their different tempi must be listed, not just that of the opening:
I. Lento maestoso, Allegro quasi doppio movimento, Lento maestoso, Allegro; II. Poco adagio, Vivace non troppo, Poco adagio, Vivace; III. Andante, Vivace non troppo, Andante, Allegretto; IV. Andante moderato, Allegretto scherzando, quasi tempo di marcia; V. Allegro, Meno mosso, quasi tempo primo, Meno mosso; VI. Lento maestoso, Vivace, Lento, Vivace.

The first three movements are linked harmonically, and usually played continuously; the last three—not harmonically linked—are normally played with slight pauses between them. Many musicologists contend that this gives it the character of a four-movement piece. The Trio Sol did not make this distinction, giving equal weight to each of the six movements, but following the tempi within each.

Joseph Kim.

Joseph Kim’s cello soared gloriously in several of them, often introducing thematic material taken up by the piano and then the violin; in particular I was transported by his playing in III, and Veronika Manchur on violin in V. Colin McDearman's pianistic anchoring of the whole piece, and his taking center-stage where the piano is highlighted, were superb.

Gratefully, I still have the video for still another encore of the entire concert which deserved the fulsome appreciative applause that it received from the audience.

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Classical Interludes, First Lutheran Church and School, Torrance, Saturday, October 4, 2025, 3:00 p.m. Images: The performers: Classical Crossroads Inc; Khoma and Vynnytsky: You Tube; Dvořák: Wikimedia Commons. 

“Musical Friends” Unveil the Unfamiliar at Mount Wilson

l-r: Kyle Gilner (violin), Jonah Sirota (viola), Geoff Osika (double bass), Micah Wright (clarinet),
Gigi Brady (oboe).

REVIEW

“A Celebration of Strings and Winds” by Hans Gál, Britten, and Prokofiev, 100-inch Telescope Dome, Mount Wilson Observatory

DAVID J BROWN

In his usual welcome at the penultimate event in this year’s season of Sunday Afternoon Concerts in the Dome, Mount Wilson Institute Trustee and COO Dan Kohne asked for shows of hands from those who were making their initial visit and those who had been before. The rough split was about 60/40 in favor of the first-timers—doubly encouraging both because it showed that the word about these unique seasons and venue is well and truly out and, given that the seating area encircling the 100-inch Hooker telescope was healthily filled if not a sell-out, that today's relatively unfamiliar program was not an audience turn-off, either for newcomers or seasoned attendees.

Jonah Sirota.

The violist Jonah Sirota had curated it as an exploration by a group of “musical friends” of chamber works scored for both stringed and woodwind instruments; as he noted in his introduction, there’s plenty of repertoire for each family separately, but together? Not so much. Influenced by the venue, his choice had homed in on pieces written within two decades of the telescope’s opening, of which the first to be played was at once the last completed (in 1935) and by the oldest and longest-lived of the three composers, as well as the figure least known today.

This was Hans Gál (1890-1987), an Austrian/Jewish composer, performer, teacher and scholar who, when he wrote his Serenade for clarinet, violin and cello, Op. 93, had already had his academic career in Germany summarily terminated by the Nazis, and within three years would flee to the safety of Britain. This Serenade, though, bears no signs of personal turmoil, being one of many elegant and poised exemplars of the musical values enshrined in the great Austro-German classical tradition, composed by Gál throughout his very long career.

Hans Gál.

The first of its four movements, a sonata structure headed Cantabile, opens with a long, gently aspiring clarinet melody, played here with expansive easefulness by Micah Wright. Very soon, though, this initial serenity is subverted, first by a faster, rather spiky extension of that main theme, and then throughout the remainder of the quite lengthy and elaborate movement by quicksilver changes of rhythm and texture, masterfully distributed by Gál between the three instruments, and equally masterfully navigated by Mr. Wright and Kyle Gilner (violin) and Jonathan Flaksman (cello).

Their affectionate treatment was marked in the latter part of the movement by subtle drawings-out of apparently concluding cadences only for the music to quietly turn aside and continue, as if saying “No, we’re not quite done yet…”

Micah Wright.

The Cantabile, at well over one-third of the Serenade’s total length, is by far its longest movement and is succeeded by a Burletta—effectively a concise scherzo-and-trio whose vigorous and scurrying outer sections enclose a gentle, slow-moving contemplation led by the violin. The third movement Intermezzo, with its long-breathed clarinet melody over plucked strings, similarly showed Gál’s skill at conveying spaciousness within a brief span (just three minutes), its concluding clarinet cadenza running straight into the jaunty strains of the Giocoso finale—which nonetheless accommodates a reprise of the Intermezzo’s exquisite musings before the cheerful music returns.

Kyle Gilner.

This rare but memorable and gorgeously played opener was followed by the 18-year-old Benjamin Britten’s Phantasy Quartet for Oboe and String Trio, Op. 2 from 1932. This wasn’t the first occasion on which this work had been heard in the 100-inch Hooker telescope dome; series Artistic Director and cellist Cécilia Tsan played it with three of her own musical friends in the second concert of the third season on 2 June, 2019, and it was instructive to compare impressions of that performance (reviewed here) with this account from four different and equally skilled collaborators.

Gigi Brady,

More than in that earlier performance, I felt, the piece was dominated here by Gigi Brady’s oboe, which presented as a confident, even at times imperious, protagonist throughout the work’s several varied and linked episodes, beginning with its quasi-pastoral melody that blooms after the opening march from the three strings (Mr. Sirota here joining Messrs. Gilner and Flaksman).

Over 24 measures Britten builds this up from the most fragmentary, uncertain beginnings, muted, ppp, and played pizzicato sul tasto (on the fingerboard). The players’ assured handling of its assembly gave it just the right sense of growing aim from initial hesitancy.

Benjamin Britten in 1930.

Whither was the youthful genius Britten marching with such strutting purpose, and where from? As ever, his late-flowering contribution to this peculiarly English sub-genre of chamber music (always distinguished by that “ph” for “phantasy” to label the single, multi-section movement) impressed by his acute ear for striking sonorities, skillful creation of an original, complex, and unpredictable design, and remarkable maturity of expression overall.

It could be argued that Gál’s designating his Op. 93 as a “serenade” might mislead some listeners to expect something more lighthearted and simple than the intricately wrought structure that it actually is, and conversely the simple formal title of Prokofiev’s Quintet in G minor, Op. 39 equally and thoroughly belies the zany, sometimes disquieting, circus romp with which these consummately skilled musical friends concluded their fascinating program.

Jonathan Flaksman.

The precise scenario envisaged under the title Trapèze by the ballet master Boris Romanov when he commissioned its score from Prokofiev in 1924 now seems lost to time, but as Prokofiev also conceived his work for concert performance, the music itself lived on, and presumably with the ballet in mind, the instrumental line-up he chose—oboe, clarinet, violin, viola and double bass—certainly enables extreme timbral contrast.

For this performance Micah Wright returned to join Gigi Brady for the work’s woodwind pairing, while in the strings Kyle Gilner and Jonah Sirota remained on stage, Jonathan Flaksman departed, and Geoff Osika came to the platform for the first time as double bassist to complete the ensemble.

Prokofiev and Stravinsky in Paris, 1920.

The first of its six brief movements (their overall cohesion here marred, sadly, by intermittent applause) is as with the Gál the longest, though not to such a marked degree. The implications of its heading Tema con variazioni are only fulfilled to a limited extent. There are just two variations, with the movement falling into two halves comprising (1) the long theme itself—given a notably tongue-in-cheek lachrymose quality in this performance—plus the equally extensive and medium-paced first variation, and (2) the second variation, Vivace, with gadfly leaps and glissando squeals all over the ensemble, followed by a full reprise of the lugubrious theme.

Next up is an Andante energico. Was Prokofiev teasing expectations and players’ abilities with this seemingly contradictory marking? If so, Mr. Osika responded as well as anyone could imagine with the elephantine thudding and chugging of his opening double bass solo, after which what is effectively continuous variation on that solo’s elements from all the players well lived up to what Mr. Sirota called the work’s “rag-tag circus band quality.” The movement’s unexpectedly long-drawn quiet ending gives way to more chugging and raucousness in the ensuing Allegro sostenuto, ma con brio, but for me the highlight was the fourth, Adagio pesante, movement.

Geoff Osika.

Played with measured intensity, this grim, lowering drama surely marked in the original ballet the entry of some sinister malefactor (a distant pre-echo of Pennywise, perhaps?), as well as in its latter stages recalling somewhat the great glistening, downward-sliding chords with which Prokofiev’s on-and-off friend and rival Stravinsky opens the second part of The Rite of Spring. Frenetic scurrying was back in the fifth movement, Allegro precipitato, the players here tending to zoom on through the qualifying ma non troppo presto.

Always unexpected, Prokofiev concludes his Quintet with an Andantino that begins with what sounds like a stately, slightly ghostly dance that then veers off into more discursive, dissonant scampering. The activity eventually dies down to a pizzicato double bass solo before the slow dance returns, Tempo primo. This builds up a considerable head of steam before violent sextuplets in the clarinet, viola, and double bass chase down, tumultuoso e precipitato, to a single, cut off, final chord.

Cécilia Tsan: Artistic Director, Sunday
 Afternoon Concerts in the Dome.

Perhaps the Mount Wilson audience was too discomposed by the sheer weirdness of the piece to give the five players the standing ovation they most richly deserved for their virtuosic and impactful performance. For this listener the whole concert was one of the richest and most rewarding yet in eight years of attending Cécilia Tsan’s and Dan Kohne’s truly unique series.

This season has been both the biggest (nine concerts compared with previous years’ six) and the most musically wide-ranging. In the greatest possible contrast, the final concert on Sunday, October 19, will be given by Los Angeles’ all- female Mariachi band, Mariachi Lindas Mexicanas.

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100-Inch Telescope Dome, Mount Wilson Observatory, Sunday 5 October 2025,
3 p.m. and 5 p.m.

Images: The performance: Taavi Sirota; Jonah Sirota, Jonathan Flaksman: artists' websites; Hans Gál: composer website; Micah Wright: Pasadena Conservatory of Music; Kyle Gilner: Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; Gigi Brady: Pasadena Symphony and Pops; Prokofiev and Stravinsky: Legendary Musicians/Facebook; Geoff Osika, Cécilia Tsan: Long Beach Symphony.

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A Tour of Piano Trios to Open the SBCMS Season

The Elixir Piano Trio: l-r Fang Fang Xu, cello; Samvel Chilingarian, violin; Lucy Nargizyan, piano.

REVIEW

Elixir Piano Trio, South Bay Chamber Music Society, Pacific Unitarian Church, Rancho Palos Verdes

DAVID J BROWN

Amongst the LA area’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of highly-skilled, professional chamber music ensembles, the Elixir Piano Trio (Samvel Chilingarian, violin; Fang Fang Xu, cello; Lucy Nargizyan, piano) seems to have passed me by—and to my loss, judging by their program for the first concert of the South Bay Chamber Music Society’s 63rd season, as ever under the Artistic Directorship of Robert Thies.

Drawing of Mozart in silverpoint, April 1989.

This amounted to a chronological mini-conspectus of the piano trio genre from the late 18th to the mid-20th century, but one that neatly side-stepped its most celebrated 19th century (male) names. The Elixirs began with Mozart, and the fifth of his six numbered trios. Composed in summer 1788 at around the same time as his last three symphonies, this Trio in C major, K. 548, despite the key signature’s cheerful implications and its opening measures resemblng a familiar jaunty phrase from an aria in The Marriage of Figaro, is emotionally unsettled and ambiguous.

The first movement exposition is bright-eyed and perky enough, but the development plunges into the minor, and in this performance the tendency to darkness was emphasized both by the Elixir Trio’s trenchant dynamic accentuation and their omission of the repeat. Indeed, the lack of repeats throughout made the work, at a tight, 16-minute whole, seem a very different animal compared with, say, one British period instrument recording where the inclusion of every repeat stretches it to nearly half-an-hour.

Clara Schumann in 1850.

The Elixirs’ dramatic drive was maintained in the next item, written more than half a century after the Mozart. Clara Schumann’s Trio in C minor, Op. 17, from 1846 bids fair to be regarded as the magnum opus in her slender output. Though it follows the familiar four-movement pattern of sonata-design opener, scherzo-and-trio, slow movement, and fast finale, there’s no sense of this being by rote. Rather, it seems the natural home for Schumann’s inspiration.

A long-breathed first subject shared between all three instruments, punctuated by a peremptory fortissimo figure, leads to the exposition's well-contrasted and rhythmically unpredictable second theme. Again the Elixirs did not observe the exposition repeat—and though this was in some ways regrettable, it did serve to emphasize the dramatic thrust of their interpretation, as they dug straight on into the development’s tensile pile-up of overlapping figures, before the lead-back to a full recapitulation.

By contrast, they took a relaxed view of the tempo di menuetto Scherzo—delightfully tripping in ländler-ish contrast to the serious first movement—and gave equal measure to the wistfully lingering Trio, before the Scherzo’s return. All three players relished the beauties of the Andante, beginning with the songful main theme, introduced on the piano and then passed successively to the violin and the cello. The Allegretto finale revisits the first movement’s vigor, and the Elixir Trio skillfully elucidated Clara Schumann’s teeming invention through to the dramatic end.

Rachmaninoff in 1892.

After the interval, they moved on another half-century or thereabouts to the one-movement Trio élégiaque No. 1 in G minor, composed in 1892 by Sergei Rachmaninoff when he was still under 19 years of age. Here they responded as expansively to his late-Romantic Slavic melancholy as they had tightly delineated Mozart’s and Schumann’s Classical structures in the first half, but with the caveat as usual with this piece that it sounds like the first movement of a larger whole—in other words, leaving one wanting more!

Gayane Chebotaryan.

A further leap of half a century brought us to another single-movement piano trio, this time from Western Asia, and written by a composer who few present, surely, would have heard of. Gayane Chebotaryan (1918-1998) was born and died in Russia, but spent most of her working life in her native Armenia, where she achieved considerable recognition. In the Elixirs’ idiomatic and committed account of her Trio for Piano, Violin, and Cello (1945), strains of folk melodies and rhythms certainly brought to mind her more famous countrymen Khatchaturian and Babajanian, and left one wondering if her other works are as immediately engaging.

Astor Piazzolla.

The final temporal jump, this time just a quarter-century, also swung us half-way around the world to Argentina and Astor Piazzolla. His Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas (Four Seasons of Buenos Aires), written between 1965 and 1969, seem to be getting almost as ubiquitous, both collectively and individually, as Vivaldi’s Venetian original, and comparably in as many arrangements.

The otherwise excellent (but sadly online-only) program notes by Saagar Asnani of UC Berkeley did not reveal whether the piano trio line-up for Otoño Porteño (Buenos Aires autumn) (1969) was Piazzolla’s own or by another hand. Either way, it can rarely have sounded as haunting and rhapsodic as this performance, led by Fang Fang Xu’s eloquent cello. 

 … and there was an encore: more Piazzolla, and one of his greatest hits—Oblivion, to really sound out the depths of Latinate melancholy, and to the huge appreciation of the South Bay audience. 

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South Bay Chamber Music Society, LA Harbor College 8:00p.m./Pacific Unitarian Church 3:00p.m., Friday/Sunday, 19/21 September, 2025.

Images: Elixir Trio: artists' website; Mozart, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, Piazzolla: Wikimedia Commons; Chebotaryan: Armenian National Music; the performance: author.

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Celebrating LA From Mount Wilson’s Vantage Point

The lights of Los Angeles glow against the night sky from the vantage point of the “monastery,”
the astronomers’ accommodation at Mount Wilson Observatory.

REVIEW

The Zelter String Quartet play Todd Mason and Beethoven

DAVID J BROWN

I was particularly sorry to have missed the July event in this summer’s bumper season of Sunday Afternoon Concerts in the Dome at Mount Wilson Observatory (season preview here). Some of LA’s finest musicians, led by cellist Cécilia Tsan, Artistic Director of the series and joint mastermind behind it in tandem with Mount Wilson Trustee Dan Kohne, had been joined—in a program of Schumann, Beethoven, and John Williams—by the astronaut violinist Sarah Gillis on the 56th anniversary of the first Moon landing.

However, if that concert had its focus firmly upwards, not only towards the Moon but also the recent Polaris Dawn mission in which Ms. Gillis memorably played “Rey’s Theme” from Wlliams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens score accompanied by groups of musicians electronically linked from around the world, then the most recent, on the first Sunday in August, could be said to have turned its gaze, at least for part of the time, downward to the city spread out on the plain nearly a mile below the Observatory’s mountain fastness.

City of Angels, a homage by LA composer Todd Mason (left) to the city of his birth and present domicile, has had a slightly complicated history. Originally conceived as his Fourth String Quartet, Mason’s reworking for string orchestra (which can be heard on YouTube) acquired the title City of Angels. At Mount Wilson the latest version of the quartet, into which he carried over those minor revisions as well as the title, received its world premiere by the Zelter String Quartet (Kyle Gilner and Gallia Kastner, violins; Carson Rick, viola; and Allan Hon, cello).

Individually and collectively these marvelous young musicians are familiar both at Mount Wilson (LA Opus review here) and at other local chamber music venues, including Mason’s own House Concerts, and judging by that previous Mount Wilson premiere—of his String Quartet No. 3—and the present performance, they are at once au fait with the idiom and up to its considerable technical challenges.

In contrast to Quartet No. 3’s extensive single-movement structure, City of Angels is in three separate movements representing aspects of Los Angeles: Restless City, Dream City, and Irrepressible City. Rather than the overall “fast / slow / fast” arrangement one might expect, “slow(ish) / slow / (very) fast” overall describes their pacing more accurately; tellingly though, Mason’s own indications—Pensive, Expressive, and Festive & Fast!—say more about mood than motion alone.

Restless City certainly is just that, but the Zelters proved themselves masters of its twists and turns: constant changes of time signature, abrupt loud/soft, soft/loud dynamic switches, and sudden rapid-fire attacks and intervallic leaps, though perhaps its most ear-catching feature is the frequent slurring from one dissonant chord to another, which could well be heard as a musical metaphor for the treacherously unstable ground upon which LA is built.

With the four instruments muted throughout, Dream City could also have been headed Pensive, and at this movement’s opening Mason affords each player an opportunity to shine, with eloquent, slow-moving solos seamlessly handed forward one to the next: in particular 1st violin Gallia Kastner added some wonderfully expressive nuance here. Textures thicken and the music rises to brief forte climaxes, but the somewhat bleak introspection is never far away before the music settles to a final long-held chord of rare warmth.

Irrepressible City is a concise rondo, played here with whiplash fervor by the Zelters. Recurrences of its punchy opening section are punctuated by brief returns to the inquietude of the earlier movements, and this finale is also permeated throughout by the metrical restlessness that particularly characterized the first movement though was also present in the second, if less marked there due to the slower speeds.

If I have a concern, it’s that the City of Angels title could be taken to signal a more lightweight, illustrative piece than it actually is—just a sidebar to an increasingly impressive sequence of numbered string quartets (Mason has already complete the Fifth, likely to be heard in his House Concerts next year). But no breezy travelogue, this intricately wrought and intensely thought-through quartet is a worthy companion to its predecessors. Maybe the warmer, more upholstered timbres of the string orchestra version lend themselves better to the title.

"Beethoven nears the end," by Oswald Charles Barrett.

Either way, it says a lot for the technical mastery and expressive fervor of Mason’s quartet that it felt neither dwarfed nor sidelined when preceding one by the greatest exponent of the medium who ever lived.

Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 12 in E-flat major, Op. 127, the first of the four mighty works that embodied his ever more original explorations during 1825 and 1826, is outwardly the most conventionally assembled of them, being in the usual four movements as opposed to, successively, the five, six, and seven of Quartets Nos. 15 in A minor, Op. 132, 13 in B-flat major, Op. 133, and 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131.

The trenchant Maestoso chords with which the first movement begins certainly sound like a grand portal opening onto a new expressive world, but what follows is anything but portentous. Beethoven promptly sideslips to an amiable little tune that introduces an elegant, economical, and slyly subversive take on the sonata design that in many previous works he had exploited with unprecedented structural resourcefulness and expressive power. At its pianissimo wisp of a close, after barely seven minutes, he leaves us still wondering what kind of a work this is.

But the theme-and-variations slow movement that follows is as expansive as the first was concise, and here the Zelters gave it all the expressive space that it needs, just as they had bodied forth so expertly the quicksilver twists and turns of its predecessor. The Vivace scherzo and the poundingly vigorous Finale both had all the requisite energy, but without compromising clarity even within the exceptionally resonant acoustic of the 100-inch telescope Dome. As with the Mason, the quartet played Beethoven's ever-challenging masterpiece (Gallia Kastner and Kyle Gilner here swapping their 1st/2nd violin roles) with all the expressive nuance it needs, as well as consummately tight rhythmic unity.

It was a pity, I thought, to omit the long second-half repeat in the scherzo, not only reducing the movement’s scale but rather deflating Beethoven’s joke at the end, where for a handful of Presto measures he seems about to bring back the pell-mell Trio section yet again (a trick he’d previously played in the scherzos of the Seventh and Ninth Symphonies), but it didn’t detract from the performance’s impact as the response of the audience made clear, many of whom doubtless were experiencing the magic of this unique venue for the first time.

Brief extracts from this concert can be enjoyed on YouTube here. The next in this season takes place on Sunday, August 19 with, as usual, two performances at 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. Cécilia Tsan will be joined by Evan Price (violin), Roch Lockyer (guitar and vocals), Zach Dellinger (viola), and Brian Netzley (bass) in a tribute to the violinist Ben Powell, who played in the very first concert of Mount Wilson's inaugural 2017 season, but died at the tragically young age of 38 in 2024.

 

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100-Inch Telescope Dome, Mount Wilson Observatory, Sunday 8 August 2025, 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.

Images: LA at night: author; The performance: Todd Mason; Beethoven: Oxford Companion to Music.

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“Cellissimo” at Mount Wilson

REVIEW

Cécilia Tsan and Allan Hon play Barrière, Bach, Gernot Wolfgang, and Offenbach, Mount Wilson Observatory

DAVID J BROWN

Two eminently listenable three-movement suites by French composers, one Baroque and one Romantic, book-ending an acknowledged masterwork and a world premiere, plus a much-loved encore, and all in a unique venue… what’s not to love? And lest anyone think that adjective to be unwonted hyperbole, has any other observatory in the world repurposed a telescope dome as a concert hall, besides its existing function?

From tentative beginnings in 2017, the summer seasons of Sunday Afternoon Concerts in the Dome at Mount Wilson have gone from strength to strength (always excepting the “covid year” of 2020), and for 2025 there are more, and more varied, concerts than any previous year, masterminded as ever by Artistic Director Cécilia Tsan and Mount Wilson Institute Trustee Dan Kohne.

So on the last Sunday in June a capacity audience, a good half being first-timers, seated itself on the platform that surrounds the 100-inch Hooker telescope for this season’s first classical concert. Dan Kohne set the scene, noting that this day, June 29, was the 157th birth anniversary of the observatory’s founder George Ellery Hale—and then there was the ever-memorable engineering spectacle: the dome’s giant observation shutter slowly cranking open far overhead, and the whole structure rotating around the stationary telescope (the machinery still operating perfectly in its 108th year), carrying the audience and performing platform into position for ample light without direct glare.

If one word could sum up the performances by Cécilia Tsan and Allan Hon, respectively Principal and Assistant Principal Cello with the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, that word would be “generosity”—not only in how they listened to and responded to each other through the many opportunities for give-and-take that the music enabled, but also in the spacious tempi that the dome’s resonant acoustic tends to require.

Jean-Baptiste Barrière.

Both the initial Andante (with its first half repeat exquisitely hushed) and the Prestissimo finale of the Sonata No. 10 in G major of Jean-Baptiste Barrière (1707-1747) were notably more relaxed than some performances to be found on YouTube. Though famous in his day as a virtuoso cellist, Barrière was not a prolific composer, with just four collections of cello sonatas to his name plus a handful of other pieces. Today his works seem little-known, judging by his sparse representation in current CD listings, but this performance showed that we’re missing something: the two-minute central Adagio, in particular, was a perfect miniature of soulful, galante introspection.

Jacques Offenbach, c.1850.

The output of Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880) was at the opposite extreme. Before he embarked upon his nearly 100 operettas he had a whole first career as almost as prolific a composer for the cello and as a virtuoso on the instrument—a recent complete recording of just his cello duos extends to seven well-filled CDs. The last item on Tsan and Hon’s “Cellissimo” program was Offenbach's Duo Op. 51, No. 1, and if the literally dozens of others are anything like as charmingly varied and tuneful as the three movements of this one, then they also need to be brought into the light!

Gernot Wolfgang.

Local SoCal resident Gernot Wolfgang (b. 1957) originally wrote his Ready to Rumble! in 2019 for two contrabassoons, but this was the first performance in his new arrangement for two cellos. If it lost some of the pawky rudeness of the original (cf. YouTube) in its jazzy, off-kilter rhythmic elements, then in the hands of Tsan and Hon it gained lyrical warmth in the slower, more ruminative sections.

Ready to Rumble! in its cello duet version was a fun jeu d’esprit, and clearly enjoyed by audience and players. However, it had the misfortune to follow—as would have been the case for just about any work—a piece that's not only a supreme creation for the instrument for which it was originally conceived but also what has been called one of the greatest achievements of humanity in any medium.

J. S. Bach, c.1720, around the time of
the composition of his Partita No. 2.

This was  the Ciaconna fifth movement of J. S. Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor for solo violin, BWV 1004. Nonetheless—though it may be sacrilegious to say it—for this listener at least the sense of sheer strain in almost any violinist performing the Ciaconna tends to militate against reacting to the piece as an emotional experience besides its impact as a tour de force of ingenuity and execution. But this was almost shockingly not the case with the cello duo arrangement by Claudio Jaffe and Johanne Perron as played by Cécilia Tsan and Allan Hon.

With the music’s elaborate strands separated out, clarified, and judiciously shared between the two instruments, plus their deep, rich sonorities, and together with the masterfully judged pacing and subtle rubato of the whole, Tsan and Hon delivered a powerfully expressive account shorn of any distracting effortfulness. To take just one instance of their control and shaping, the careful broadening and emphasis at the Ciaconna’s mid-point when Bach brings us back to the opening theme made the moment extraordinarily powerful and moving. It seemed to say “this is where we came from, but though we have come far, there is still so much more…” They delivered.

Finally, there was that much-loved encore piece, Ennio Morricone’s radiantly sentimental main theme from Cinema Paradiso, played from the heart by Tsan and Hon. Under its spell it was easy for the cinematic mind’s eye to see the movie’s concluding montage of romantic clips (click here or on the image above)— spliced together in secret by the old projectionist Alfredo—as flickering shadows against the steel panels, struts and beams of Hale’s great dome—truly a Coelestium Paradiso.

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100-Inch Telescope Dome, Mount Wilson Observatory, Sunday 29 June 2025, 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.

Photos: The performance: Todd Mason; Barrière: IMSLP; Offenbach and Bach: Wikimedia Commons; Gernot Wolfgang: Composer website; Cinema Paradiso clip: YouTube.

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Long Beach Symphony’s “Love Stories” Season Finale

Eckart Preu, Music Director of the Long Beach Symphony, backstage at the Terrace Theater with some of the dancers from the Modern Apsara Company.

REVIEW

Long Beach Symphony, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach

DAVID J BROWN

A crash course in a few of the hand gestures integral to Cambodian dance isn’t perhaps the first thing you’d expect in a pre-concert talk but, as delivered by Mea Lath, founder and director of the Modern Apsara Company of Long Beach (not coincidentally home to the country’s largest Cambodian community, indeed the largest outside South-East Asia), this was just part of the more-than-usually-packed half-hour preamble to the LBSO’s ambitious and colorful 90th anniversary season finale, hosted as ever by Music Director Eckart Preu.

And truly colorful the opening item was: the gorgeously-clad Modern Apsara dancers (above and below) enacted Sovann Macha and Hanuman, an excerpt from the Reamker, a version of the Sanskrit Ramayana that now forms the Cambodian national epic. Ms. Lath’s insight into this one aspect of Cambodia’s two millennia-long cultural history aptly aided understanding of the dancers’ meticulously controlled and hypnotically slow movements.

They were accompanied by the locally-based Master Ho Pin Peat Ensemble, plus discreet orchestral underpinning as arranged by Hans-Peter Preu. In a second facet of the pre-concert presentation, the Cambodian composer Chinary Ung (b. 1942)—whose own work was next on the program—had joined Ms. Lath and Maestro Preu to introduce the players, their traditional instruments, and the music itself: sonorously repetitive, dominated by the sound of deep-toned xylophones, and together with the dance bringing a brief and enigmatically impressive glimpse into a performance art profoundly different from any Western counterpart, if such there be.

Chinary Ung.

Though Ung’s Water Rings Overture (1993) is scored for quite modestly-scaled Western orchestral forces, the confident performance by Preu and the LBSO generated an imposing wall of percussion-flecked sound from within which threads of melody arose, coiled, and dissipated, confirming the impression of a static, even hieratic presence, rather than the purposeful forward movement that “overture” normally implies.

Certainly not outstaying its welcome at under seven minutes, it left this listener with a sense of something impersonal and discovered, rather than composed. The haunting and somehow open-ended quiet close to the Water Rings Overture certainly invited further exploration of Ung’s work.

If the Water Rings Overture represents one filtration of an oriental musical tradition through occidental resources, then The Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto, the main work in the concert’s first half, can be regarded as another, and startlingly different, one. It was written in 1959 by two Shanghai Conservatory graduate students, He Zhanhao (b.1933) and Chen Gang (b.1935), who took an ancient Chinese folk tale of forbidden love as the basis for a work combining Chinese and Western musical resources.

Banned during China’s Cultural Revolution, the work resurfaced in 1978 and has become much loved and widely performed there and farther afield (the celebrated Japanese violinist Takako Nishizaki has made no fewer than seven commercial recordings of it!). The soloist for the LBSO performance was the equally celebrated Chinese star Gao Can (below), who personally introduced the work both in the pre-concert presentation and immediately before his performance.

Unless you have a positively diabetic reaction to “sugary pictorialism” (as one sniffy British reviewer characterized it), The Butterfly Lovers’ Violin Concerto is as purely pleasurable as any other work that explores the lyrical resources of the violin (e.g. think Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending). 

After a ppp strings and harp introduction, above which a rapturous flute solo flutters and hovers (perfectly floated here by Principal Heather Clark), the violin was constantly front-and-center throughout the work’s remaining 25 minutes, and Gao Can’s playing ran the gamut from exquisite musings on the very edge of audibility to vigorous passage-work, taking in a soulful duet with Principal cellist Cécilia Tsan in the third of the work’s eight continuous sections.

The title “concerto” is indeed somewhat of a misnomer, as the piece is much more a symphonic poem with soloist telling a detailed narrative. Indeed it’s possible to imagine a performance with appropriate visuals and surtitles to keep the audience up to speed on the story. Without any of this, however, and with soloist, orchestra and conductor clearly enjoying thoroughly their collaboration, The Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto was a big hit with the Long Beach audience, and Gao Can’s performance of it was cheered to the roof.

Tchaikovsky in 1877, the year he began
work on the Fourth Symphony.

After the interval it was back to the Western symphonic canon heartland with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 (1877-78), an obvious choice as it was both the work which concluded, 90 years previously to the day, the LBSO’s inaugural season in 1935, and the piece that Eckart Preu chose to conduct in his 2016 audition concert that won him the his Musical Directorship of the orchestra.

In remarks before the present performance he emphasized, understandably, the emotional turmoil Tchaikovsky was in when he wrote his Fourth Symphony, and the consequent expressive extremes that it embodies, but it is also a marvelously constructed work, a consummately fruitful interplay of impulse and craft. Indeed there’s a case to be made for the first movement—nearly as long as its three successors put together—to be regarded as the finest single symphonic structure that Tchaikovsky ever composed.

Most essentially a ballet composer, and a master at creating long, memorable melodies that don’t necessarily lend themselves to Beethovenian-style motivic development, Tchaikovsky nonetheless in this movement builds from just such elements a coherent and towering edifice that never feels forced or in danger of coming apart at the seams, despite extremes of dynamic, pace, and texture. All this was reinforced in a performance as skillfully paced and balanced in terms of both instrumental voices and control of tension and release as anyone could desire.

The Moscow Conservatory
student Antonina Miliukova:
Tchaikovsky's marriage to her
precipitated the composer’s
breakdown—the background
against which the Fourth
Symphony was composed.

As one example, the clarinet+bassoon link between the opening “Fate” fanfare and the first main theme (Tchaikovsky the ballet composer marks it In movimento di Valse) had just the right combination of hesitancy and anticipation, qualities that equally applied to the subtly applied ritardandi in the long winding down of tension, again carried by clarinet and bassoon, between the exposition’s hammering final statement of the main theme and the long-delayed emergence of the second subject, Moderato assai, quasi Andante, introduced by Principal Michael Yoshimi’s clarinet with just the right degree of lugubrious jauntiness.

As for Maestro Preu’s exemplary control of textural balance, one example that stood out among many was the nominal start of the recapitulation when the upper strings reintroduce the main subject over a timpani onslaught—all the parts are marked fff but where some conductors allow the timpani to drown out the strings, here the torrential cascade of the melody itself clearly penetrated despite timpanist Gary Long giving his considerable all.

Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky’s
wealthy patroness from 1877 onwards:
though they never met, their epistolary
relationship helped sustain the composer
while he was writing what he called “our
symphony,” which he dedicated to her.

The middle movements are simple ABA structures, contrasting both with the far-flung complexities of the first movement and with each other in terms of pace, scoring, and emotional character. Maestro Preu kept them moving, but at the opening of the Andantino in modo di canzona allowed room for Principal oboist Rong Huey Liu’s long solo to achieve the required plaintive melancholy, while in the scherzo the full strings showed no signs of raggedness in their long passages of rapid unison pizzicati.

The Finale’s opening lacked nothing in crash-bash excitement, giving way to thrillingly unanimous string figuration and whiplash exchanges with the wind band, so that the whole build-up to the central re-emergence of the first movement’s “Fate” motif felt hectically perilous.

But Tchaikovsky’s addition here of cymbals and bass drum gives it a showy theatricality that rather undermines the motif’s previous gaunt menace, and after the ritenuto, carefully controlled by Maestro Preu, where Tchaikovsky compresses the texture and dynamic down to cellos and basses, piano, he gave the orchestra its head in an audience-galvanizing rush to the finish.

Maestro Preu and the LBSO rehearsing Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony. 

It’s difficult to conceive a more fitting and dynamic conclusion to this celebratory season, and as Maestro Preu also noted in that packed pre-concert presentation, the “Love Stories” theme extended to fond farewells to three retiring members of the orchestra, Julie Feves (Principal bassoon), Paul Castillo (2nd clarinet), and Victoria Bacon (cello), each with over 40 years’ service to their credit.

Also moving on was Assistant Conductor Pola Benke (left) to a comparable role at the Pacific Symphony, and notably to her new post as Music Director of the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra. Congratulations to her, and welcome to Emmanuel Rojas, the LBSO’s new Conducting Fellow!

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Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach, Saturday, June 7, 2025, 7.30 p.m.

Images: The performance: Issy Faris, Long Beach Symphony; Chinary Ung: wmft.com; He Zhanhoa and Chen Gang: musicbookslit.com; Gao Can: China Daily; Tchaikovsky, Antonina Miliukova, Nadezhda von Mech: Wikimedia Commons.

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