The venerable chamber music association, Camerata Pacifica, will play its season-opening concert in Santa Barbara at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 15, in Hahn Hall on the Miraflores campus of the Music Academy of the West.
The program for this concert will consist of Sergei Prokofiev‘s “Sonata in D-Major for Flute & Piano, Opus 94 (1943);” John Harbison‘s “String Trio (2013);” and Dmitri Shostakovich‘s “Piano Trio No 2 in e-minor, Opus 67 (1944).”
They will be performed by Cameratans Inna Faliks, piano; Paul Huang, violin; Adrian Spence, flute; Ani Aznavoorian, cello; and Richard Yongjae O’Neill, viola.
The Harbison Trio was written on a commission from the Camerata, who gave it its premiere public performance three years ago, in September 2014, performed by Movses Pogossian, violin; Richard Yongjae O’Neill, viola; and Ani Aznavoorian, cello.
O’Neill and Aznavoorian will repeat their roles, with Huang taking the violin part this time around.
After the premiere performance in Los Angeles, the “Trio” was very positively reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, whose reviewer wrote: “This is a major addition to the tiny string trio repertory.” [Yes, tiny — even Haydn wrote only 21 of them.]
The Trio offers a variety pack of sensations: mystery, disturbance, tranquility, exaltation — all of which seem to have something to do with Mozart‘s masterpiece in the combination, the “Divertimento in Eb-Major, K. 563 (1788).”
If there are passages of considerable flamboyance, the overall mood is one of austerity, but the work is mesmerizing throughout, and I hope it will have joined the pitifully small number of American chamber works that are regularly played in American concert halls.
The Prokofiev and the Shostakovich were written within a year of each other, during which the Soviet Union, where both composers were living, went from no longer losing the war with Germany to palpably winning it, but the two works have very little to do with each other.
A comparison shows Prokofiev was far and away the better composer, from a musicological point of view, Shostakovich the much more passionately aware of his own time.
In the midst of the upheavals of the war, Prokofiev is clearly turning his gaze backward, to his Paris years. The opening passages could have been written by Poulenc, and the whole thing is French-flavored.
Shostakovich, on the other hand, cannot seem to tear his attention away from the horrible crimes committed upon European Jewry by the Nazis. His “Trio” makes up for its lack of sophisticated construction with his unrivaled gift for drama. Both works are fabulous musical experiences.
Admission to the concert is $56. For tickets and other information, show up at the box office, call the Camerata Pacifica, 884-8410, or email tickets@cameratapacifica.org.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.