by Geoffrey Wieting
A single blue downlight defined the small arena in which the Junction Trio battled composers ancient and modern, as well as our expectations of concert decorations, on a gloomy Saturday night on an otherwise dark stage at Jordan Hall. “Given that live performances are the beating heart of Celebrity Series, we’re always interested in how the live performance experience evolves. The key, as always, is to improve and expand, not detract, while also being open to what form those improvements might take,” Gary Dunning, CEO of Celebrity Series, told this writer after the concert. During the few hours of music making, lighting designer/board operator Anne Dresbach got us in the mood with color changes of the single central instrument, cookie projections of labyrinthine patterns and well-aimed general lighting. The completely dark house contributed to the mysterious suspension of time and place, but made reading and note-taking all but impossible. On the whole, we welcome this attempt to avoid the mundane.
And in addition to enhancing and rejuvenating the concert experience, JCT had planned to begin the second half with their own arrangement of numbers from Gesualdo’s stunning and cosmically chromatic Tenebrae Responsoria (1611), the Attaca into the Schumann Piano Trio in D minor Op. 63, but after the handouts were released, they decided the plan would end in disaster. Instead, cellist Jay Campbell declared that his arrangement of Thomas Morley’s wittily instructive song ‘Christes Crosse’ from his 1597 ‘Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke’ was better suited to connecting with Schumann’s energetic and passionate favourite. Campbell left the audience free to pause with applause or to let Schumann continue without a pause.
Morley set the vocal line with two instrumental parts serving as accompaniment, with the performers expected to achieve some interesting figurations. Conrad Tao’s piano part (in Campbell’s transcription*) began in a straight line but was repeated in double, triple and quadruple bars, urging the stars to align. “Stephan [Jackiw] (who plays the vocal line) will go his own way, like he always does,” Campbell opined, and indeed the number felt in-the-moment and improvisational – almost orderly.
The audience, concluding that JCT had made a good choice, remained silent at the end of the number, allowing the Schumann to inevitably begin.
In the interest of refreshing the concert experience, JCT may have projected the words in increasingly rapid vortices:
Christes Crosse be my speede to proceed in every direction,
A, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, p,
q, r, s, & t, double w, v, x, with y, ezod &
for himself, with for himself,
title, title is amen,
When you’re done, start again
But they may also have looked back to the 19th-century practice of breaking up movements, and thus preserved the Gesualdo. How about:
- With energy and passion
Morley
- Lively, but not too fast
Gesualdo
- Slowly, with deep feeling
- with fire
The combined players, individually virtuosic, elegant, poetic, bel canto and wild, lived up to the expectations of the Celebrity Series in every respect, adding their names to the list of celebrity trios such as Cortot-Thibaud-Casals, Ax-Kavakos-Ma , Die Fine Arts, Istomin Star Rose. The young Junction Trio also bring an appealing stagemanship, a determination to shatter limiting patterns and a shared infectious joy of making music.
The concert had begun with the East Coast premiere of Amy Williams’ Bells and Whistles, co-commissioned by the Boston Celebrity Series. The composer noticed that
The term ‘bells and whistles’ comes from the fairground organ and also early 20th century ‘master clocks’ which could operate various clocks in a factory or school to ring bells or blow whistles. These sound images are combined with other types of bells (fire alarms, train whistles, bell towers, cuckoo clocks, anvils). The piece consists of three interrelated sections – the first focusing on clocks (mechanical, ticking sounds), the second on trains (fast, moving), and the third on (tinkling, accumulating) bells.
Despite the possible digression into the enslavement of clocks and factory workers, the opener avoided overt messages like the crumple of single-use garbage bags in Tao’s politically correct Piano Trio No. 2, heard on Rockport Music’s Summer 2019 season…although Tao does take to the piano at the beginning of Bells and Whistles made us expect the worst.
The first move [had in 2021] opened with over a minute in which Tao crumples and stretches a plastic bag – and nothing else. Indeed, much of the movement seemed to be an attempt to push the boundaries of what constitutes music, often resorting to sound effects rather than musical tones and recognizable phrases. Tao holding the bag while playing had no discernible musical effect, just seemed to be a visual gimmick. (Geoff Wieting)
While Tao mastered many loud and fast ostinatos, Jackiw and Campbell hardly behaved like enslaved persons in their scrapings, con legnos and pizzes; In fact, the three players apparently acted fairly independently as they progressed into clustered episodic bursts. Later string harmonies whispered soft impressionism (the blue light felt particularly apt), while the backing piano loomed with double-speed riffs before fading into haze…not quite soon enough.
Ravel’s A minor Piano Trio, a staple of the repertoire, followed without programmatic inevitability, though we certainly received it with gratitude. The players saturated Jordan Hall with the beautiful vocal tone we knew they possessed. Of course, they mastered Ravel’s mood swings, coloristic effects, jazzy rhythms, sophisticated atavisms, harmonic shifts and haunting melodic reverie. Listeners in 1913 must have wondered if they or the composer had lost their minds. Today we can be happy.
The editor has permission to close this review with Geoff Wieting’s excellent account of the work and the equally memorable journey of the Junction Trio from Rockport in 2021.
Ravel’s 1913 Piano Trio must also have been considered by many to be an outré at the time, but although the composer used unusual nomenclature in the pantoum and passacaille middle movements, they are essentially variations on traditional tropes; moreover, its harmonies, while far exceeding those of the still active Fauré, Widor and Saint-Saëns, sound tame by the idiom of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps of the same year. The musicians imbued Modéré’s first movement with the gentle melancholy so common in Ravel’s oeuvre, but with a particular sophistication in this piece. The movement’s climaxes had all the oomph and power needed, but it was the more lyrical and graceful moments – rolled piano chords and string glissandi – that beguiled my ears the most. At the end, the beautiful, distant echo of the first subject, now in Relative major, was deeply moving in its simplicity.
Junction Trio (Photo by Robert Torres)
A pantoum is a Malay verse form of four-line stanzas, but Ravel adapts it to the music in the second movement, weaving two main themes throughout, while building it into a virtuosic scherzo that is not bantering but rather a surging tsunami of the cheerfulness . Still, the unrelenting energy should not preclude the clear execution of a revealing detail like the triplets in the second main theme, as sometimes happened. Still, the momentum and power of this traversal was overwhelming without sacrificing the balance between the instruments, and the performance left the audience noticeably gasping at the end – in a good way!
For me, the deeply expressive climax of the concerto came in the third movement of the passacaille. Again, this is not a term you would expect to find in chamber music, as it is most commonly associated with solo organ literature (using the more common Italian term passacaglia), denoting a set of variations built on a ground bass. Naturally, given the egalitarianism of chamber music, Ravel allows the main melody to wander through all parts of the texture throughout the movement. The performers carefully constructed a great arc, beginning in the depths of the solo piano’s bass, gradually taking it to a powerful climax that seemed to shake the hall, and then with equal care gradually descending from the top. Towards the end of the movement, the muted string duet with virtually no vibrato and the final repeat of the piano’s low bass solo were stunningly beautiful and moving, each giving a foretaste of Ravel’s stil dépouillée (slimmed-down style) heard in so much of his work from the 1920s.
After the profound splendor of the Passacaille, the airy delicacy of the finale quickly lifted us back above the surface of the earth. . . although not everything was easy. Ravel makes perhaps his only indirect reference to the unfolding horror of World War I in the triadic fanfare figures assigned to the piano. These could have been much more martial and tinny; Tao’s overly generous kicking here hampered the French ideals of clarity and lucid brilliance. Joy triumphs with the arrival of the chordal climax in the piano, crowned by scintillating string trills, and the unforced power and virtuosity of the trio was awe-inspiring once more as Ravel’s magnificent work came to a sonorous conclusion
Lee Eiseman is the Editor of Intelligencer
Geoffrey Wieting holds bachelor’s degrees in organ and Latin from Oberlin College and a master’s degree in collaborative piano from the New England Conservatory. He is a freelance organist, collaborative pianist and vocal coach. He sings with the Back Bay Chorale and is a board member of the Old West Organ Society.
*Charles Wuorinen also took on the challenge of arranging this famous Morley song and helpfully described his task:
CHRISTES CROSSE is a setting for soprano and piano of a vocal exercise from Thomas Morley’s 1597 PLAINE AND EASIE INTRODUCTION TO PRACTICALL MUSICKE. In the original, a simple cantus hovers over two lower voices, which become more complex and active as the piece progresses. In my version, these parts are transcribed to the piano, with significant changes brought about mainly by changes of register. This reinforces the already slightly hysterical quality of the original. -CW, May 1998
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