Oregon Music News

Victor Steinhardt

Composer Victor Steinhardt took the stage to open the latest installment of Chamber Music Northwest’s summer festival in the Kaul Auditorium at Reed College. Saturday night, June 26th, was as warm and perfect an evening as could be hoped for, and the music seemed uncannily suited to it.

The night opened with two tangos by Victor Steinhardt, with composer on hand to play the piano while his brother Arnold Steinhardt took up the violin. The first was simply called Tango, composed in 1996. Much of it moved along bi-tonally, in a strangely ordered dissonance like two people starting off with the same idea and then running with it, each heedless of the other. The bass-line at times resembled the famous Habañera from Carmen, and an hypnotic cacophony transformed into a dulcet cadence, ending with a glissando scritching up one string of the violin to fade away to nothing.

The second tango was a world premiere entitled Tango Fantasy, and the two brothers were accompanied by CMNW artistic director David Shifrin on the clarinet. It began with a very deliberate ostinato, and the work featured many imitative entrances that saw clarinet and violin chasing one another down falling decrescendi, coming together tonically after a wild ride.  One never lost the feeling of the dance however, no matter what permutations the composition underwent: the pumping heart of the tango was always there, even if subdued at times. The texture was often very spare and dry, so that small shifts took on an outsized significance.  The work ended with a joyous wailing on the clarinet and violin until the pianist crashed down with a thunderous, reverberating plunk to signal that it was all over.

Fritz Kreisler’s String Quartet in A Minor (1919) rounded out the first half. Arnold Steinhardt remained on first violin, accompanied by Ida Kavafian on 2nd violin, violist Steven Tenenbom and cellist Peter Wiley. The broad chordal movement that characterized virtually the entire work was novel and scintillating at first–one had to listen but for a moment to understand that harmonically this work was an inheritor of Debussy; indeed this lone string quartet by Kreisler was obviously a stylistic cousin to Debussy’s lone contribution to the genre.  However, Kreisler was no compositional genius as was Achille Claude–to slightly alter  the famous quote from Amadeus, ‘there is in fact only so much homophony the ear can hear in the course of an evening…’ The almost unvarying vertical structure of the work grew tiresome, the once luscious architecture became fetid. This was no fault of the players; rather the monolithic nature of the composition allowed the musicians to zero in on timbre and blend and phrasing. Kreisler’s composition is such that it felt smothering, making one want to beg for space, but instead one is pinned down and held until forced to see the light. The beauty and variation in this work lay in the interpretation more than the composition itself, and the players introduced this variety through dynamics and mood swings.

The evening ended with Mozart’s String Quintet in C Major, K. 515. For this work, Ani Kavafian took over the first violin, Ida Kavafian switched to second viola and the group was joined by Rebecca Anderson on second violin. The first movement was dominated by a repetitive eighth note figuration that was delivered with metronomic precision, allowing Ani Kavafian’s glorious singing tone the freedom to run wherever it needed. If there is anything more rapturous than a Mozart Andante played with true feeling and insight, I’ve yet to find it.  The duets between Ani Kavafian and Tenenbom were truly a seamless interweaving, and at times it was difficult to tell when one instrument stopped and the other picked up the reins.  A moment too to praise Peter Wiley’s playing on the cello.  He never fails to come up with just the right phrasing, at just the right dynamic and at the perfect time. There was a moment in the Andante as the phrase drew to a close when the cello began running up the scale to fulfill its cadential duties only to continue on its flight of fancy with no pause, showing complete disregard for whence it came.  Wiley’s delivery was impeccable–he truly made it possible to live completely in the moment, to allow music at its best to do what it does best–to make us forget everything but one shining, matchless moment in time, and that moment is the here and now.  Only with such superb playing does this phenomenon become possible.