Charles Petzold

One of my favorite places to see music is the Weill Recital Hall. It’s part of the Carnegie Hall complex but seats about 1/10th the number of people that the big hall holds. It’s an ideally intimate venue for recitals and chamber music. Even from the seats in the tiny balcony you can hear everything.

This evening at the Weill was the first of the season’s Musicians from Marlboro, featuring chamber music performed by musicians from the Marlboro Music School in Vermont. Two string quarterts from the standard repertoire bracketted some vocal music.

In what might be a first — at least in my experience — two of the compositions in the program were inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata! This is a story about a man who kills his wife when triggered by jealousy, misogyny, Christianity, and perhaps Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 7, called the Kreutzer Sonata because it was dedicated to violinist Rudolph Kreutzer.

Leoš Janáček’s first String Quartet called the “Kreutzer Sonata” was intended to portray the psychological states of the man’s wife. The Marlboro musicians — violinists Geneva Lewis and David McCarroll, violist Zhanbo Zheng, and cellist Marcy Rosen — captured well the disjointed angular frantic agitation of this music.

Next was a world premiere by Iranian composer Aida Shirazi (b. 1987), who is also cofounder of the Iranian Female Composer Association. Her work Soliloquy of the Unnamed is for soprano and violin based on four short poems by American poet Adelaide Crapsey about loss and sorrow and death. While the poems don’t deal directly with Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, Aida Shirazi has written:

While reading The Kreutzer Sonata, it struck me that Pozdnyshev never reveals the name of his wife. Historically, erasing the name of women has been a common trait of patriarchy, and it still takes place in our time. I hope that the title Soliloquy of the Unnamed sheds some light on this form of violence and oppression.

The songs were performed by soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon and violinist Geneva Lewis, and I found them quite moving. Instead of the violin being an accompaniment to the voice, they seemed more like a duet. At times the phrases of the poems were brokent into fragments, at times the words were separated and individually caressed. In the last song, called “Triad", the violinist drums her fingers on the violin strings while the soprano whispers the words:

These be
three silent things:
The falling snow ... the hour
Before the dawn ... the mouth of one
Just dead.

The beautiful voice of Lucy Fitz Gibbon was then accompanied by pianist Kuok-Wai Lio for more familiar songs: Schubert’s three “Ellen” songs from a German translation of Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake, ending with the original version of the song that has come to be known as “Ave Maria.” Here are Kuok-Wai Lio and Lucy Fitz Gibbon taking bows following the performance:

After that, the first Schumann String Quartet landed us with a crash back on earth. Wonderfully played, capturing the anquish that erupts from the first movement, the rhythmic intertwinings of the scherzo, the whoozy trio, and then... What’s that sound?

Something was dimly thumping with the persistence of a pile driver, even vibrating the floor between our feet. The violist went backstage to check what it might be, returned and whispered something to the cellist, who announced. “Construction” and then as if the words explained everything: “It’s New York City.”

The show must go on, and the quartet continued with Schumann’s lovely Adagio and then the energetic jabs of the Presto finally vanquished the pile driver, or whatever it was. In the end, Schumann won the battle, and the musicians from Marlboro won:

October 28 Addendum:

An email from Marlborn Music today apoligized for the disruption during the concert and attributed it to the Carnegie Hall HVAC system. As compensation, they offered complimentary tickets to the next Musicians from Marlboro concert at Weill Recital Hall. Thank you!