Four Fascinating Hungarian Trios

April 30, 2001

By Benjamin Frandzel

The SFCMP concluded its season on Monday, April 30, with a visit to one of Europe's most distinctive and fascinating musical cultures. The all-Hungarian concert at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum featured trios by four of that country's greatest composers, each of them connected to a common tradition but each utterly unique. The players were at their best in the evening's least-known music, though a bit less convincing in the modern-day classics by Bartók and Ligeti that framed the program.

The connecting thread among the evening's composers was Sándor Veress, a student of Bartók's and a teacher of Ligeti's and Kurtág's. Although his music is almost never heard here or anywhere else in the United States, his String Trio proved a wonderful discovery, with its thoughtfully developing counterpoint, extreme sensitivity to texture, and incisive, unpredictable rhythms.

Veress's conception in this work is very broad and entirely coherent. A lengthy chorale opens the piece before giving way to the sort of biting melodic gestures that make the work so compelling. The scherzo-like second movement is equally fine, mixing invigoratingly rapid, irregular accent schemes, some surprising percussion on the instruments' bodies, and angular, propulsive lines for a rousing finale. Roy Malan, Nancy Ellis, and Stephen Harrison showed a great deal of sensitivity toward the Trio's delicate balances, gradual development, and changing moods, and they brought plenty of energy to its more driving passages.

The inimitable music of György Kurtág also appeared on Monday's program, in the form of his 1981 Bagatelles for flute, double bass, and piano. As is almost always the case with Kurtág, this work is a collection of miniatures, with a host of references to other composers and to his own works.

From the opening "Duhös Korál" ("Furious Chorale"), the trio of flutist Tod Brody, pianist Thomas Schultz, and bassist Steven D'Amico tuned in quite accurately to Kurtág's brand of harsh lyricism. Brody gave an especially vigorous performance, and delineated the implied counterpoint of Kurtág's "Hommage á J.S.B." with great control. Schultz also proved to be an ideal player for Kurtág's intricate textures and mercurial moods, with his incisive clarity and broad vocabulary of tone colors. Although the work's most exposed moments occasionally revealed some spotty bass intonation, they also showed the composer's amazing control of musical resonances — even the thinnest textures released a rich mix of overtones in the hall.

Unfortunately, such moments were all too rare, because the Forum's terribly dry acoustics played an all-too-prominent role in the perception of the music. For such an intimate grouping as a trio, a richer acoustic is really essential. The hall's unresponsive walls seemed to draw much of the life and fine detail out of the music. Ellen Wasserman's rich piano tone in the Bartók Contrasts seemed merely muddy, and the careful control of colors that is written into the Ligeti Horn Trio, with its precise planning for the horn's overtones, was only partially apparent.

Nonetheless, the Ligeti received a solid performance from Malan, Schultz, and horn player Lawrence Ragent, who exploited his instrument's palette as broadly as possible, even within the limits of the acoustics. This is a difficult work for both performers and listeners, a first exploration of some of the harmonic and rhythmic ideas that Ligeti perfected in later pieces. I'm still not quite convinced that it stands alongside his greatest works, but the evening's performance brought out many fine aspects of the writing. Some especially strong moments came from Schultz's driving second-movement ostinato and the sweeping figures layered over it, and the trio's intensely attacked rendition of the marchlike third movement.

The evening began, appropriately enough, with Bartók, whose Contrasts contains many of the elements that were threaded through the program: rhythmic excitement, biting melodic figures, and an exacting concern for musical structure. The fireworks that really make this piece take off weren't quite there, but Wasserman, Malan, and clarinetist William Wohlmacher excelled in the work's more lyrical moments, bringing a gentleness to the second movement and a sweet, airy quality to the finale's slower middle section.

(Benjamin Frandzel is a Bay Area musician and writer. In addition to writing concert music, he has collaborated with dance, theater, and visual artists, and has written about music for many publications and musical organizations. He is currently a graduate student in composition at San Francisco State University.)

©2001 Benjamin Frandzel, all rights reserved