"Following Beethoven" with Levick, Mason String Quartets

Composers Todd Mason and Hugh Levick bookend the members of the Lyris Quartet (Alyssa Park, Shalini Vijayan, Timothy Loo, Luke Maurer) at the Mason Home Concert, February 22, 2020.

REVIEW

Lyris Quartet, Mason Home Concerts
John Stodder Jr.

Having been to several of the Mason Home Concerts—in a stylish one-story house on a quiet, tree-lined street in Mar Vista—I’d become used to host Todd Mason offering top featured ensembles, soloists, or vocalists the opportunity to perform his own works, as well as generously giving similar slots to local composers—both well-known (e.g. Eric Whitacre and John Williams) and less so—alongside the more familiar menu of Haydn, Brahms, Schubert, Bartók, Stravinsky, etc.

This concert featured the celebrated Lyris Quartet, and it closed with the premiere of Mason’s String Quartet No. 1 (2019 version). No brief sample of his work, this is a personal statement, with a strong narrative line uniting the four movements, holding the listener’s attention for 20 minutes as it unfolds its cyclical tale, challenging the musicians to explore the immense range of tonalities and colors he assembles to tell his story.

Count Razumovsky.

Raising the bar to almost impossible heights, Mason chose to have the Lyris Quartet begin the program with one of the repertoire’s great works, Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 9 in C major, Op. 59 No. 3. This masterpiece of his middle period, the third of the five string quartets he completed between 1806-10, is the last of three dedicated to Count Andrei Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador and amateur musician who commissioned them. Ever since, they have become known simply as the Razumovsky Quartets.

In his pre-concert talk, LA Opus’ managing editor, David J. Brown, talked about the revolutionary uses to which Beethoven put the string quartet format and the unparalleled expressive range that he opened up. Brown’s talk framed the evening’s performances both historically and artistically, as Beethoven’s innovations have become a kind of baseline for the string quartet experience ever since; it’s hard for us to imagine now that, in his time, the Razumovskys were deemed by some to be difficult on the ear.

Beethoven in 1804 or 1805,
painted by Joseph
Willibrord Mähler.

No. 9 is a moody work. It opens with the quartet attacking a dissonant chord with a prominently embedded diminished 5th (sometimes called “the devil’s interval”), then another similar chord, as if awakening from a bad dream. Hushed, ethereal meanderings follow, as if wandering around a dark room sorting out reality from phantoms. Beethoven is planting a flag here. Change is in the air, not just in the quartet format but also in the larger development of classical music.

With the unsettled introduction over, the first violin calls a different tune, almost restarting the piece and with a vastly more cheerful demeanor, like children skipping down a path. It has to be said how perfectly matched are the voices of the Lyris Quartet. When the vibrant new tune passed to the other players, they mirrored the first violinist Alyssa Park’s timbre precisely—a striking effect in a small venue like the Mason concert room, and the kind of musical moment one often misses in larger venues.

David Brown delivering
pre-concert remarks on the
history of the string quartet.

David Brown had noted how baroque era string quartets relied on a continuo-like bass “from which the music for the treble instruments… would be built upwards.” Those words apply perfectly to the pizzicato cello, wonderfully played by Timothy Loo, that opens the second movement with a baseline that functions like a pulse, supporting a flowing, sometimes echoing conversation among the other strings. Luke Maurer’s viola was first among equals as this brooding, richly harmonic section unfolded.

The more playful, dance-like third movement Menuetto brings the ensemble together with confident melodies. With Alyssa Park and Shalini Vijayan (second violin) perfectly matched in style, one had the feeling of a relaxing canoe trip but, knowing Beethoven, is it to the edge of an unseen waterfall? As the third movement smacks into the fourth, the change in tempo and intensity is an unexpected adrenalin rush.

The viola starts the music, this time in fugal conversation, at a frenzied pace that challenges the others to follow. By the time the cello enters, we are amidst rapids that seem right on the threshold of what is feasible with string instruments. The first violinist is perhaps the hero of this mad rush of notes, running with (or away from) the other players almost impossibly fast. Sitting five feet from them, it was captivating to hear but also to watch. Strands of broken horsehair dangled from each bow. When it ended in a flash of musical fireworks, it took a moment for the audience to catch its breath and process what it had just heard.

After a long and very well-deserved standing ovation, the audience moved to the patio for intermission, covered from a few remaining afternoon drizzles, everyone palpably buzzing from the Lyris Quartet’s energy and Beethoven’s genius. I overheard one person say “I’d heard that quartet before, but that was the first time I experienced it in my soul.”

As the show resumed, the composer of the next piece, Hugh Levick, founder of LA’s Hear Now Music Festival, joked about the difficulty of “following Beethoven.” His piece was the second movement from M.E.L.B.A. (Morning Evening Love Bears All), a four-movement quartet he described as a “love poem to my wife, Melba, and a lament for a world in which beauty, truth, and justice are laid waste by our so-immensely powerful forces of destruction.” Levick characterized the movement, Evening, as “an ungainly waltz.”

The Lyris Quartet: l-r Alyssa Park, Shalini Vijayan, Timothy Loo, Luke Maurer.

It had a whimsically mechanical quality for the first half, bringing to mind a couple having a pleasing, sometimes passionate, exchange. The “lament” begins just before the halfway point. The tempo slows to a crawl, then slows and quietens again, creating space for a soulful cello utterance followed by a conclusion full of string effects and harmonics that play like shadows in failing light. In an intimate venue like this, quiet passages and silences can be as startling as the loud parts. Levick’s movement literally faded out in front of our eyes (and ears).

Then it was time for Mason’s work. He also joked about the “intimidating shadow of Beethoven,” pointing to a pillow on the piano with that scowling face surveying the proceedings. Mason said that Beethoven was probably his biggest influence in how he writes his own music and then held up a hefty book of all the Beethoven quartets saying, “if classical music is a religion, then this might be its Bible.” In his 250th birth anniversary year, Beethoven is still shaping the evolution of music.

In the program notes Mason explained that “my First Quartet has been in the making for many years but was only recently finished and assembled in its present form.” Indeed, some of it dates back to melodies written while at Juilliard, and the long compositional gestation creates for us a life in full, seen from dual perspectives: the young composer looking forward, and the mature looking back.

Mason House, a Mar Vista concert venue.

Mason’s quartet feels like a classic journey: from innocence, conveyed by his expert use of traditional tonality in the first movement; to disorienting and increasingly stressful harmonies in the agitated, Bartók-inspired second movement; to what he calls his quartet’s “emotional heart” in the third movement. This reaches a point of near-resignation before a sudden embrace of hidden strengths, as the protagonist discovers the presence of community and a sense of life’s purpose.

The complex fourth movement, incorporating two fugues based on melodies dating from 1981, takes us on a highly cerebral journey into more abstract realms. This is challenging music; the innocent tonality of the first movement is far behind as he explores “almost every key, venturing into the shifting sands of a very chromatic landscape.” Mason empathized with the players due to the speed, complex harmony, and range of staggered entrances he requires them to make, but the Lyris Quartet was easily in its element with this kind of technically challenging material.

Shortly before the end, the first movement’s melodic texture is echoed. As if passing through the eye of a hurricane, the protagonist of Mason’s story has a moment of calm clarity, discovering something about himself in the contrast between his youthful assuredness and his struggle to master the complications of a full life. It’s a lovely moment but also a shocking one, with the force of an epiphany. And it’s over quickly. The blur of 16th notes and intensity return, but briefly, right before the curtain comes down. The story is complete, but perhaps not over. “It’s a bit like the cycle of life,” Mason said in introductory remarks. However, this “cycle of life” piece ends with our protagonist transformed and very much alive on a new path we can only glimpse.

Mason mentioned a story of one composer of Beethoven’s time who said he was going to quit composing because “Beethoven has written all the music.” Composers today, including Levick and Mason, may have the burden of “following Beethoven,” but they prove that there is still good, meaningful music to be written.

---ooo---

Mason Home Concert: 3484 Redwood Ave., Mar Vista, 6.00 p.m., Saturday, February 22, 2020.
Images: Razumovsky: Wikimedia Commons; Beethoven: Wikimedia Commons; The concert and venue: courtesy Todd Mason.

“The Most Sublime Chamber Music Work Ever Written”

l-r: Timothy Loo, Alyssa Park, Cécilia Tsan, Shalini Vijayan, Luke Maurer. Photo: Todd Mason.

REVIEW

Schubert’s String Quintet, Mount Wilson Observatory
DAVID J BROWN

Franz Schubert, supreme master of the lied, was also one of the world’s greatest composers of piano and chamber music, and in the last few months before his death on November 19, 1828, he focused on those three genres. It will probably never be possible to establish a definitive chronology for these works (Schubert also began to sketch a final symphony during this time), but on October 2 he wrote to a publisher: “Among other things, I have composed three sonatas for piano solo […] I have also set several poems by Heine […] and finally have completed a quintet for 2 violins, 1 viola and 2 violoncellos. […] Should any of these compositions by any chance commend themselves to you, please let me know.” 

Portrait of Schubert by Franz Eybl (1827).

Though the songs were indeed published (as Schwanengesang ("Swan song"), D 957) within a few months of his death, the sonatas (in C minor, D.958, A major D.959, and B-flat major D.960) did not see print for 10 years, while the quintet remained unperformed and unpublished until the 1850s. But now…? Well, if you google the phrase at the head of this review, or variants of it, odds are that you will come up with more references to Schubert’s String Quintet in C major D.956 than any other single work… by any composer. 

This view was triumphantly reaffirmed at last Sunday’s performance in the great dome of the 100-inch telescope at Mount Wilson by the Los Angeles-based Lyris Quartet (Alyssa Park and Shalini Vijayan, violins; Luke Maurer, viola; Timothy Loo, 'cello), together with Cécilia Tsan, Artistic Director of the Mount Wilson concert series and Principal Cellist in the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra. And it was given a further emotional charge by being dedicated, as announced at the outset by Ms. Tsan, to the victims of that weekend’s mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.

While Schubert’s signature gift for memorable, bitter-sweet lyricism reaches an apogee in the Quintet, the work is also one of his greatest feats of long-range planning and formal coherence, laid out in the four-movement design that by then had become a staple of the Classical style: opening sonata structure/slow movement/scherzo-and-trio/fast(ish) finale. The work, however, is on a scale unapproached at the time by all but a few of his own and a handful of Beethoven’s, with the first movement the most spacious of all, taking around 20 minutes to play if the 154-measure exposition repeat is included (as it was here, praise be!). 

But Schubert’s genius for architecture ensures the coherence of the structure through a single tempo mark at the outset, so that dislocating speed changes are avoided and other compositional resources—elasticity of note values, phrase-shaping, harmonic restlessness, and carefully detailed dynamics—suffice to drive the movement’s hugely varied progress.

Photo: Tommy Johnson.

That single marking is Allegro ma non troppo, but the way Schubert initially stretches it over a two-measure C major chord that modulates onto a diminished seventh for two further measures, on all except the second ‘cello, makes the pace feel slower than it actually is. Ms. Park, Ms. Vijayan, Mr. Maurer and Ms. Tsan (who took the first ‘cello part) got this exactly right, in their unanimity and beautifully graded crescendo from piano to forte, and in finely calculated pacing that laid out the 30 measures or so of “slow introduction” and then proceeded into the downward-plunging staccato first theme with an oceanic inevitability that still avoided any hint of rigidity.

And then the extraordinarily spacious second subject emerges, first on the two ‘cellos against pizzicati on the other three instruments. The close accord between Ms. Tsan and Mr. Loo made this as liltingly eloquent as you could wish, but without any milking of pathos due to careful observance of that pervasive Allegro ma non troppo. In the repeat the opening crescendo chord was taken just a fraction tighter and this continued throughout, so that Schubert’s launch of the development had just the right propulsiveness.

The remainder of the movement is packed with dramatic incident: slicing, dicing, and recombining of themes, restless key changes and major/minor modulations, and often with the second ‘cello (Mr. Loo here following in the steps of some of the greatest exponents of the instrument, from Casals to Rostropovich to Yo Yo Ma) acting as a kind of commentator/ringmaster through its obsessive dotted rhythms that underscore and drive the music forward. The energy of this performance was such that it underlined the fact that this was still the music of a young man, albeit a preternaturally gifted one.

That headline descriptor “sublime” is most often applied to the Adagio slow movement, whose outer sections are of a rapt beauty that seems to halt time. Some recordings take this veeery slowly but, as with the first movement, Schubert provides just that single tempo marking which also has to accommodate, without any slamming gear change, the movement’s tumultuously disturbed central section. Here again the Lyris and Ms. Tsan, to my ears, got it just right, with an easeful flowing beauty for the opening section and then a perfectly judged plunge for the torrent into which the music abruptly rushes.

Schubert's death mask.

Perhaps even greater depths of pain could have been revealed, but there was just the right degree of implacability, driven again by the second ‘cello, Mr. Loo biting out the obsessive rising staccato triplets. Eventually the thrashing subsides and Schubert slowly and hesitantly regains the beatific mood of the opening, over a number of measures that contain far more rests than notes, all of them spaciously and scrupulously observed in this performance.

The third movement, a kind of “negative image” of its predecessor, comprises an obsessively exuberant Scherzo, marked Presto, enclosing and in extreme contrast with the most tragically introspective Trio section in the repertoire. Here perhaps more than anywhere the work earns its sometime nickname of “cello quintet” (many string quintets, such as those of Mozart and Brahms, employ pairs of violas with a single ‘cello, rather than vice versa as here). The Trio is dominated by a mournful descending line on the second ‘cello, against which its companion pulls fruitlessly, and the noticeably contrasting timbres of Ms. Tsan’s and Mr. Loo’s instruments ground out the slowly shifting harmonies and dissonances like two great millwheels turning against each other.

A review I once read of a recording of this work described the Finale as “for once living up to its predecessors.” No “for once” about it here! Its ambiguous Allegretto marking notwithstanding, the Finale was fully in sync expressively with the other movements: hectic and restless, with its constant sideslips into and out of dissonance given full expression, and no let-up in the teeming moto perpetuo quality that threatens continually to become a dance of death. Schubert ends this movement, and the whole astonishing work, with a last frenzied climb to its sole triple forte, grounded in a gut-wrenching trill on the two ‘cellos, and then on the very last note a semitone appoggiatura from D-flat to C on all five instruments that in these performers’ hands stung like a dying scorpion.

In his introductory remarks at the start of the concert, Mount Wilson Trustee Dan Kohne had made the welcome request for no applause between the movements. Not only was this observed (apart from a few who prematurely thought the conclusion of the Scherzo was the end of the whole work), but after the actual end, there was an audible intake of breath and an appreciable gap of silence before applause erupted together with the, for once in southern CA wholly appropriate, standing ovation.

Bill Reichenbach.

After this magnificent account of such a masterwork, I may not have been the only listener who would happily have slipped away then and there to contemplate eternity through the filter of Schubert’s genius, amidst the mountains with a glass of cold Chardonnay to hand (yes, to make these concerts even more attractive there’s a reception with refreshments included in the ticket price between the 3 p.m. performance, which I heard, and the second one at 5 p.m.). There was, however, a short encore: an arrangement for string quintet, made specially for this concert by the trombonist Bill Reichenbach, of Scarborough Fair, which for me repeatedly recalled Vaughan Williams’ Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus… and none the worse for that! 

---ooo---

100-Inch Telescope Dome, Mount Wilson Observatory, Sunday 4 August 2019, 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. Photos: The performers: Todd Mason and Tommy Johnson; Schubert: Wikimedia Commons; Schubert's death mask: Medium Music; Bill Reichenbach: artist website. Mount Wilson: Todd Mason.

If you found this review to be useful, interesting, or informative, please feel free to Buy Me A Coffee!

More new stars shine at Mount Wilson

REVIEW

Works for flute quartet, Mount Wilson Observatory
DAVID J BROWN

l-r: Sara Andon, Alyssa Park, Cécilia Tsan, Alma Fernandez.

Of course, subsequent visits can never quite match the impact of one’s first encounter with such an astonishing new music venue as the dome of the 100-inch reflecting telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory, but the pleasurable anticipation that built up while re-negotiating all those hairpin turns on the road up to the Observatory made up for it. Once again Cécilia Tsan, Artistic Director of this new venture of Sunday afternoon summer concerts in the dome, had devised a fascinating and unhackneyed program for herself (playing ‘cello—probably the largest instrument that can be safely carried up the long and precipitous metal ladder leading to the telescope floor!) and her colleagues Sara Andon (flute), Alyssa Park (violin) and Alma Fernandez (viola). 

Three works by three highly prolific masters from the 18th and 20th centuries, Mozart, Martinů, and Villa-Lobos, formed the main part of the program. Mozart’s Flute Quartet in D major K.285 is the first of his four in the genre, probably composed in 1777-78. It’s a slender three-movement piece in which the flute is the star of the show from the outset, and this immediately demonstrated the extraordinary clarity and impact of high woodwind tone within the great steel dome. Due I am sure to the long delay time of the acoustic, the quartet took the first movement Allegro and Rondo finale at fairly relaxed speeds, and avoided the consequent lengthening of playing-time by omitting not only the rarely-observed second-half repeat in the first movement but also that of the exposition.

Bohuslav Martinů.

This was not a problem in my book, particularly as the title of the ensuing Three Madrigals for Violin and Viola H.313, composed by Bohuslav Martinů in 1949, belies their scale, range, and power just as does that of Kodály’s Duo for Violin and Cello Op.7, which Ms Tsan included in her previous recital here. The Martinů indeed for me was by some measure the highlight of the concert.

This great composer by some alchemy makes his two instruments sound like an orchestra, with Ms Park and Ms Fernandez seizing every one of the huge range of stylistic, rhythmic and timbral effects deployed across all three movements: simultaneous and alternating ostinati superimposed on Bohemian-Moravian folk rhythms in the first; overlapping tremolandi, like ripples on the seashore, overlain with what recalled a susurration of muted birdsong in the second; and a wild peasant dance in the third, where the violin and viola twirl and swirl uninhibitedly around each other. 

Having given the spotlight to the other string members of the group in this marvelous piece, Ms Tsan’s clever programming then led herself and Ms Andon to step forward in Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Assobio a Játo (The Jet Whistle) for Flute and ‘Cello W.493, like the Martinů a fairly late work in its composer's output, composed in 1950. It is similarly in three movements, the medium-paced first movement opening with a wide-ranging ‘cello cantilena against rhythmic tics and oscillations above from the flute. This is succeeded by a pensive Adagio meditation where the flute in its low register takes the melodic lead while the ‘cello gravely explores the depths beneath, and then a final hell-for-leather Vivo movement that ends in a Prestissimo carrying the following footnoted injunction in the score: “The only way to achieve the effect the composer wishes, as indicated by the words imitando fischi in toni ascendenti, is to blow into the embouchure fff as if one were warming up the instrument on a cold day(!).” Ms Andon blew as lustily as could be imagined, achieving a sound I’m sure had never been heard in the dome in its entire 100-year history…

Next came four film-music selections. Big film-music fan though I am, I can’t avoid the built-in problem that what can superbly underpin and intensify the mood of a movie scene may not stand up so well as a whole musical experience when it appears in a concert setting divorced from the visuals. There’s often not much to be done with a self-contained romantic theme other than to noodle around and then restate it, and for me diminishing returns began to set in when, after two pieces from Georges Delerue’s score to Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (“Contempt”) and one from John Williams’ Star Wars, a set from Ennio Morricone’s score to Cinema Paradiso rather outstayed its welcome. 

The late Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia
in the original "Star Wars."

However, as arranged by Patrick O’Malley for these forces (in all the above items), the husky magic of the much-loved “Princess Leia’s Theme” played on an alto flute in that unique environment was unmissable and unforgettable, while in conclusion John Williams’ versatility was underlined (as if it needed to be!) with the brief “Double Trouble” number from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, arranged for flute, violin, viola and ‘cello by Simone Pedroni. 

I very much hope that this short initial season of concerts has been as big a success from Mount Wilson Observatory’s viewpoint as it undoubtedly was from the audiences’, and that after winter snows have come and gone, more great music will be heard in the great dome next year. 

---ooo--- 

100-Inch Telescope Dome, Mount Wilson Observatory, Sunday 10 September 2017, 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.
Photos: The performers: Ruth Borst Punt; Carrie Fisher: People Movies; Mount Wilson Observatory: Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis, courtesy Los Angeles Magazine. 

If you found this review to be useful, interesting, or informative, please feel free to Buy Me A Coffee!

Jacaranda Music: Still Edgy After All These Years

Violinists Thereza Stanislav and Alyssa Park in Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa             

By Rodney Punt

Listening to Jacaranda Music’s last concert of its eleventh season, two opposing thoughts struck me. One was astonishment that its first decade (the anniversary was last October) had flown by so quickly and the other was amazement that the series hasn’t always been here. It’s hard to imagine the Southern California music scene without Jacaranda’s “Music at the Edge of Santa Monica” shaping and defining it.

The sobriquet is accurate; the series holds forth a few blocks from the edge of the Pacific Ocean (in the acoustically superb First Presbyterian Church) and it is known for its edgy mix of eclectic music. Featured works have extended as far back as the beginning of the eighteenth century and as near to the present tense as world premieres. But it’s not the chronological span of its repertoire that defines Jacaranda so much as its mission to crown the essential musical canon of the twentieth century.

It was a troubled, messy hundred years, along with its music, and Jacaranda has taken on its significant sounds one concert step at a time. Take for example the evening that tweaked my interest a few weeks ago, one of those typically diverse affairs where the connections may not be all that apparent, even as you read the extensive (and delightfully idiosyncratic) program notes of Artistic and Executive Director Patrick Scott, who helms the series with Music Director Mark Alan Hilt. 

The program on this evening was something of a victory lap for Jacaranda. Titled “Abandon,” it included works by Mozart and Debussy that had featured on earlier occasions, with two obscure pieces by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. On paper the kindredness of these composers to each other seemed remote, but in the hearing, each work shared within its own delicate frame an aural sensation not unlike that of parting curtains on a summer’s day to reveal intense outdoor illuminations.

Jacaranda Winds, with Hilt, in Mozart's "Grand Partita"

The Serenade for Winds (“Gran Partita”) is a work of early maturity composed during Mozart’s heady first years in Vienna. Describing its elusive beauties in technical terms is as hopeless as examining how a box-pinned butterfly flies. Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus has a lyrical passage that comes close to its magic, as the playwright’s alter ego, Antonio Salieri, muses on the celebrated slow movement:

“It started simply enough, just a pulse in the lowest registers, bassoons and basset horns like a rusty squeezebox. It would have been comic except for the slowness, which gave it a sort of serenity. And then, suddenly, high above it sounded a single note of the oboe. It hung there unwavering – piercing me through – till breath could hold it no longer and a clarinet withdrew it out of me and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight it had me trembling… I was suddenly frightened. It seemed to me I had heard the voice of God.”

The “Jacaranda Winds” dream-team of fine players -- stand-ins for the voices of God -- were led by a supple and expressive Hilt. Mozart intended the oboes and clarinets to have the featured roles, and they were indeed glorious here. But in truth the composer gave each of the sonorities its moment in the sun: the oboes of Claire Chenette and Claire Brazeau, the clarinets of 
Joshua Ranz and Andrew Leonard, the basset horns (alto clarinets) 
of Gary Bovyer and Steve Roberts, the bassoons of 
Anthony Parnther and Maciej Flis, the horns of 
Allen Fogle, Paul Klintworth and Sarah Bach. All were ably underpinned by Nico Abondolo's string bass. (Special recognition must be granted, however, to Anthony Parnther, whose bassoon provided magnificent passagework and the ultimate in tonal purity.)

Maria Casale in Debussy's Danses Sacrée et Profane

Claude Debussy’s Danses Sacrée et Profane 
delivered another opportunity for aural sheen. The work, for harp and a string quartet with added bass, is a spiritualized mélange of erotic religious dances. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the steamy side of ancient cultures was in titillating musical vogue. (Strauss’s Salomé and Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps come to mind.) A friend of Debussy's devised a literary fraud, purporting to have discovered, then translated, risqué poems etched on the Greek tombs of antiquity. We can thank those arty concoctions for the composer's delightful work, which sings in an ethereal sensuality comparable to Maurice Ravel’s more famous harp vehicle, the Introduction and Allegro.

Maria Casale's effervescent pedal harp was given extra visual sizzle by the instrument’s radiant sheen, far surpassing the more burnished colorations of other golden harps. With the First Presbyterian Church’s solemn cross just above Casale’s harp, all that was needed was a good dose of stage fog to evoke the Elysian Fields on a libidinous day. Casale's stunning virtuosity, with good support from her strings, put the work over in fine form and it was a great hit with the audience.

Two works by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt rounded out an evening of raptures. Darf Ich of 1995-99 and Tabula Rasa of 1977 are separated by twenty years, but they share similar musical territory. Their  composer is often described as a “holy minimalist” for his aim to achieve musical “tintinnabulation” while straddling interweaving strands of sin and forgiveness; also for his spare musical textures that seem to stop time and look deep into the heart’s sad recesses. 

Shalini Vijayan and Jacaranda String Ensemble

Darf Ich, for solo violin, string ensemble and chimes, was written in memory of Yehudi Menuhin. Shalini Vijayan provided the seraphic solo in the short concertante work that meditates, with piquant dissonances and high-flying sighs, on falling tears over a grieving multitude. Jacaranda’s program notes suggested the performance might have been a Los Angeles premiere.

Tabula Rasa is a two-part work for two solo violins, string ensemble and a prepared piano. Pärt specialist Paul Hillier has described its first movement as a series of separated silences that grow shorter until overwhelmed by a loud cadenza, with a quiet second movement that slowly unwinds into another silence. I found the unwinding portion the most compelling, with its undulating waves of floating tenderness and wistful dissonance. Both Pärt works featured solos of gently stabbing notes in the highest reaches of the violin’s E-string, becoming in the second one a haunting, obsessional trope.

Both works were conducted with sensitivity by Hilt. Richard Valitutto's prepared piano added the spooky atmospherics and the "Jacaranda String Ensemble" supporting sonics in the second piece. But it was the solo violins that emerged as the evening's stars in both works.  In the imitative passages of Tabula Rasa, Thereza Stanislav and Alyssa Park lobbed to each other stratospheric notes of uncanny beauty and perfect intonation, that had required laser-like concentration from both to bring off properly.

With Shalini Vijayan in the earlier work, the three soloists in these relatively short pieces by Pärt seemed almost like luxury casting. In fact, all three violinists are regulars on the series. Park and Vijayan are in the Lyris Quartet, Jacaranda’s house ensemble, and Stanislav, a frequent guest soloist, is Assistant Concertmaster of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra at nearby UCLA. The evening reminded those present that the last century produced works not just of noisy angst but also of profound delicacy and inwardness.

Southern California’s good fortune is to have instrumentalists who regularly provide such stylish interpretations as were on this occasion encountered. But it was also the sensibility and resourcefulness of of Jacaranda Music's leadership that had brought these artists and works together, enabling their audience to “abandon” all earthly concerns for a couple blissful hours. The concert was a fitting close to Jacaranda's current season and to its past and newly launched decades of matchless connoisseur programming.

Stanislav and Park (in blue hues) take bows with Jacaranda Strings and Hilt

---ooo---

What: Jacaranda Music, "Abandon" [W.A. Mozart: Serenade for Winds (“Gran Partita"), Claude Debussy: Danses Sacrée et Profane
, Arvo Pärt: Darf Ich; Tabula Rasa]

Where: First Presbyterian Church of Santa Monica, California

When: Saturday, May 10, 8:00 pm


Who: Soloists Maria Casale, harp; 
Shalani Vijayan, Alyssa Park & Tereza Stanislav, violins; Richard Valitutto, prepared piano. 
Jacaranda Winds
: Claire Chenette & Claire Brazeau, oboe; 
Joshua Ranz & Andrew Leonard, clarinet; 
Gary Bovyer & Steve Roberts, basset horn; 
Anthony Parnther & Maciej Flis, bassoon; 
Allen Fogle, Paul Klintworth & Sarah Bach, horn. Jacaranda Strings: 
Kevin Connolly, concertmaster; 
Alwyn Wright, Jenny Takamatsu, Rafael Rishik, Susan Rishik, Katie Sloan, violin; 
Jerome Gordon, Caroline Buckman, Patrick Rosalez, viola; 
Tim Loo & Alisha Bauer, cello; 
Nico Abondolo & Steve Dress, double bass. Mark Alan Hilt, conductor.

All photos by Andrea Sanderson are used by permission of Jacaranda Music.

Rodney Punt can be contacted at [email protected]