
This four-part quartet paints the seasons it is a Romantic updating of Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (1719). No one appears to know what this august, impressive masterpiece is about, so I will toss-in my middle-brow two cents. I am a music appreciator, a poet, rather than a musician. I have a stack of books on Brahms which offer interesting technical observations on the intricacies of Piano Quartet No. Unzipped, it turned out to be a bottle of champagne to tempt the Quartet to play with high-octane bubbling notes. The spontaneous intimacy of the piece delivers contagious delight.Īs the second half was about to begin, a strange new instrument was brought on stage in a zipped leather case. Jamie Laredo’s violin filled the auditorium with happiness. The concluding Allegro molto offers a joyous reversal in domestic celebration of wife, children, and friends with a brief recollection of Faure’s first musical fascination, the ringing of rural church bells. The somber Adagio, where Sharon Robinson excelled on cello, laments the recent death of his father and Polonsky evoked deep emotional texture here. The opening dotted rhythms of the Scherzo declaim the composer’s freedom of the heart to wander at will with form. The opening Allegro in sonata form appears to question, playfully, the form itself. 15 (1879) by Gabriel Fauré, who had his own distinctive, late Romantic sound, offers autobiographical musings as improvised diary jottings amid redolent reverie.

On viola Milena Pájaro-Van De Stadt performed a few difficult passages while on piano Anna Polonsky conjured a range of moods from happy to fierce, yet it was the viola that was in the end both more fragile as well as fierce. A musical soundscape of dreams, as in French impressionist paintings, floats in molten aerial aesthetic with sumptuous subtle harmonies. For reliable information go to: Rebecca Clarke music history, which is a serious omission. , she does not usually appear in books about U.S.

Although Clarke was born with American citizenship and lived much of her life in the U.S. While a successful public performer and composer, her compositions were sporadic. Clarke, a world-renowned virtuoso viola player. (Its first performance was at Aeolian Hall.) An impressionistic work influenced by Claude Debussy and Morpheus remains an important chamber work and its selection for this concert of difficult works to play added to the excitement of expanded horizons. Rebecca Clarke’s Morpheus (1917) for piano and viola may not be familiar to many concert attendees today, yet during Clarke’s lifetime, it was a well-known concert piece performed at Carnegie Hall in 1918. Jaime Laredo, Sharon Robinson, Milena Pájaro-Van De Stadt, Anna Polonsky
