Monday, March 6, 2023 - 3:52pm
More than 50 listeners filled nearly every seat in the West Tisbury Library community room for Saturday’s concert by the chamber ensemble Music Street: pianist Diane Katzenberg Braun, violinist Sophia Anna Szokolay and cellist Alan Toda-Ambaras. Sampling some two centuries of classical music, from the Romantic era to the present day, the trio played lesser-known compositions from Russia, Ukraine, France, Germany and the United States. “I sometimes feel like Alice in Wonderland running down rabbit holes as I discover new works,” Ms. Braun told the audience. “Many of the compositions on this program are new discoveries and new to us, so it’s been really fun to put it together,” she said.
Music Street opened the concert with a sprightly allegro from a piano trio by 19th-century Russian composer Sergei Taneyev. A disciple of Tchaikovsky, Taneyev also intimidated the older composer, Ms. Braun said. “Tchaikovsky lived in dread of his criticisms... because Taneyev was the head of the Moscow Conservatory [and] he won first prize in piano and composition,” she said.
Introducing Clara Schumann’s Three Romances, for violin and piano, Ms. Szokolay noted that the 19th-century pianist and composer is generally overshadowed by the two male composers in her life: Johannes Brahms, who loved her, and Robert Schumann, who married her. “I feel like Clara deserves to hold her own,” said Ms. Szokolay, noting that the composer wrote 300 works, played her own music on tour and performed Three Romances for an “ecstatic” King George V of Hanover (the German kingdom later annexed by Prussia).
Light-footed and lushly Romantic, the three Schumann pieces led to an impressionist piano trio by Melanie Bonis, a French composer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who tried to hide her sex by publishing as Mel Bonis. “Women were not respected as musicians or even professional people [at the time],” Ms. Braun said. But the composer’s secret was an open one. After Camille St.-Saëns heard the Bonis trio, Soir-Matin, in 1907, he said “I never thought a woman could write something such as this,” Ms. Braun told the audience. As played by Music Street on Saturday, the movement Soir was a tone poem of twilight in the gentle, gliding mode of Saint-Saëns’s warhorse The Swan, as Ms. Braun’s rippling piano blended with Mr. Toda-Ambaras’s deep-toned cello and Ms. Szokolay’s singing violin.
A pair of Ukrainian composers came next, both born in 1937 and one, Valentin Silvestrov, still living. “He was originally a civil engineer,” Mr. Toda-Ambaras said as he introduced Mr. Silvestrov’s Postlude III. Emerging as a composer in the 1960s, Mr. Silvestrov declined to follow the Soviet Union’s top-down aesthetic standards, Mr. Toda-Ambaras said. “Instead of going along with... the government, Silvestrov decided he was going to write his own style, and this may have contributed to his not being as promoted or well known,” he said. Written in 1982, Postlude III is a stately, almost reverently deliberate duet for cello and piano, from a composer whose work has been described by critics as “austere.” “It really takes you into a timeless space,” Ms. Braun said.
Mr. Toda-Ambaras and Ms. Braun continued with a duo by Nikolai Kapustin, who was born in the Donetsk region of Ukraine and died in 2020. Fascinated with jazz, but unable to improvise, Kapustin wrote works that manage to dance with one foot in the classical tradition and the other in modern jazz. Saturday’s audience heard the hopscotching duo Nearly Waltz, followed by Ms. Braun’s performance of Kapustin’s rollicking, blues-tinged Piano Prelude XVII.
Music Street concluded its concert with two works by contemporary female composers, Jessie Montgomery of New York and Stacy Garrop of Chicago. Ms. Montgomery’s two-movement duo for violin and cello, Antics and Serious Fun, took the arpeggiated sounds of 20th-century minimalism — think Philip Glass — to new, far-from-minimal places, adding pizzicato, slides and capering melodies. The work is a tribute to Ms. Montgomery’s friendship with cellist Adrian Taylor, for whom it was written, Ms. Szokolay said. “In [Montgomery’s] words, ‘It’s an ode to the friendship... with movements characterizing friendship, adventure, laughter and sometimes a little silliness,’” she said.
Ms. Garrop’s Jubilation was commissioned for the 60th anniversary of Chicago classical radio station WFMT in 2021, Ms. Braun said. The piano trio contains what is sometimes called an Easter egg in other media, such as films and comics: a hidden, but decipherable reference to something outside the work. “We’re playing in 9/8, 8/8 and 7/8,” Ms. Braun said, referring to the meter of the piece. “That is to reflect the frequency of the radio station,” she went on, as the audience started to laugh. “It’s 98.7.” The stirring, celebratory trio sent Saturday’s audience to its feet in a prolonged ovation.
Augmented by a clarinetist, Music Street performs the last of its three annual off-season concerts at the library in June.
NEC Alumni Spotlight for National Giving Month
December is National Giving Month, and NEC celebrated and honored alumni who dedicate their time by giving back to their communities.
Several NEC alumni shared how their time at NEC shaped their journey and ignited their passion for wanting to make a difference in the world.
Diane Katzenberg Braun is honored to be featured in this special NEC spotlight. Click here or below to view this alumni feature.
