Bartholomew LaFollette, ‘cello; Hyeyoon Park, violin; Caroline Palmer, piano. Nadia Boulanger; Three Pieces for cello & piano; Rachmaninoff, Cello Sonata in G minor Op.19; Schubert, Piano Trio in E flat D929
I’ve never been to the Conway Hall before. According to its website it is “a hub for ethical thought and dialogue since it opened in 1929 as the home of what is now the Conway Hall Ethical Society. As an independent home for ideas and culture, it supports diverse communities to engage with ethics through learning, conversation, and creativity, exploring the defining questions that shape our daily lives. Named after Moncure Conway, the abolitionist, freethinker, and former leader of the Ethical Society, Conway Hall was built to foster ethical discussion through lectures, debates, concerts, and social gatherings.” Obviously within this context it also hires the hall our as a venue – hence this concert. The hall itself is rather spartan and slightly art-deco-ish, with other meeting rooms flanking the hall, and with hard seats. But it has a very lively and warm acoustic (lots of wood) and is ideal for chamber music. The inscription ‘To thine own self be true’ is in capital letters above the stage (I have always found this an odd statement for Shakespeare to make – selves are made through dialogue, not by looking inward – but perhaps he was seeing this as a Polonius-type remark). The hall seats I would guess about 350 people – there must have been about 100 people present, so it didn’t feel very full….
I thought this was one of the best chamber music concerts I have been to for a long time. This was to do partly with the experience of the warm acoustics, giving a wonderful edge to the string instruments – but also to the depth of knowledge and understanding these experienced musicians had of the pieces they were playing, particularly the Schubert, where the performance was much more engrossing, and offered much more of a narrative than the Ensemble 360 reading of this work I heard in Sheffield about 18 months ago. Particularly significant to me was how they handled the Schubert finale. This can seem repetitious, particularly when the plodding Winterreise theme of the slow movement comes back to haunt the finale, and comes again….and again,…..like a threatening ghost at a feast. In this performance, a subtle slowing down before the final transformation of the Winterreise theme into the major key, and the intensity of the string sound at that moment, felt like a real sea-change, a sudden burst of hope in this increasingly desperate movement, going round and round in circles. The trio were good in the other movements too – they took the first movement repeat and made the whole movement much more structurally clear than I have ever heard it before. The slow movement had some agonised and intense playing at its climaxes – savage-sounding at points. This was one of the few late Schubert pieces which had a performance in his lifetime and in his presence – what on earth must people have made of its grief and manic despair? The third movement had, where needed, the Viennese laendler lilt. This performance strengthened my view that this is one of the darkest works Schubert wrote, but also one of the most cogent. This group very effectively avoided ‘heavenly length’ as an implicit criticism.
I also enjoyed the Rachmaninov Cello Sonata very much, the broad swinging cello melodies sounded very resonant and ample in the acoustics of the hall and the cello playing in particular had a seriousness, an intensity which was vividly communicated. While it is a bit of a wallow, truth be told, this performance never made it sound like salon music, and it reminded me how much Russian music, Russian literature, Russian visual arts are part of our shared European culture. I am glad no-one is advocating a WW1-type ‘ban on Bach’ type approach in the current political context, and sincerely hope that before I die I will once again be able to travel to Moscow and Petersburg for music. The first piece in the programme was surprisingly by Nadia, the famous teacher, not her short-lived talented younger sister, Lili, Boulanger, who has been much promoted of late. To be frank, it was not very inspired, but a good curtain-raiser.
I am so glad I went to this concert
John's musical journey 