From SFCV Emerging Writers Program
Life’s unadulterated pleasures and merciless injustices were stunningly evoked at the Oberlin Trio’s February 18 concert in Warner Concert Hall on Ohio’s Oberlin Conservatory campus. Pianist Haewon Song, violinist David Bowlin, and cellist Amir Eldan – all Oberlin faculty members – guided the audience through the extremes of human emotion: they captured the joy that saturates Haydn’s Trio in G Major and brought to Shostakovich’s Trio in E Minor a soul-quivering terror.
The program opened gently. The ensemble molded Haydn’s Trio into an expression of blissful naturalness, breezing through the first movement’s gentle flourishes and soaring with the finale’s playful folk dance themes. Amid the latter’s whirling runs and shifting tempos, the players didn’t lose each other for even a moment. Though Eldan’s cello was often too quiet, the shifting balance among the instruments always ensured that the melody line was at the fore. The musicians seemed to anticipate one another’s every volume change: it is unsurprising that they have been performing together since 2008 (they are the latest incarnation of the Oberlin Trio, which formed in 1982).
The pinnacle of the Haydn piece was the second movement, the mild Poco Adagio. Toward the middle, Bowlin performed a sorrowful melody accompanied by long cello notes and soft triplets in the piano. He played as though each note ached him, leaning into them to demonstrate pangs of emotion. His vibrato was incredibly controlled, his trills rapid and even before quickening on the final beat for an extra burst of urgency. Bowlin created a mood that, though sorrowful, was more wistful than tragic: after all, in this Haydn Trio, everything is lovely and ends with a satisfying cadence.
The same cannot be said of Shostakovich’s Trio, the highlight of a consistently impressive concert. His piece is not tragic, either: it’s much more than that. Its unrelenting dissonance and turmoil depict something that is catastrophically broken—something that has gone horribly wrong. Shostakovich wrote the piece in 1944, five years into the Second World War. Living in Moscow at the time, he was in the throes of the conflict, and he depicted it in various chilling compositions, including his Seventh Symphony. This piece is another example. In the third movement, the violin and cello’s steep rise into a melodic wail is not a cry: It’s a scream.
[Shostakovich's] piece is not tragic, either: it’s much more than that. Its unrelenting dissonance and turmoil depict something that is catastrophically broken—something that has gone horribly wrong.The Trio begins with a cello solo: Eldan smoothly slid across eerie intervals in a higher register than that of the violin, which soon entered. Song introduced a dark piano dirge using solely her left hand. Her playing was sensitive but full-bodied, giving each note a deliberate weight without overstatement. Shostakovich demands both technical feats and huge emotionality from the pianist in this Trio, and Song pulled off both, including difficult flourishes and arpeggios, with seeming effortlessness.
Soon after this ominous beginning, the piece turns into frenzied madness. Shostakovich periodically teases listeners with pleasant harmonies before immediately forcing them back into his dark disarray. During the second movement’s sudden shifts in volume, the players performed manically as if reeling from repeated, dizzy spells. Chaos continued without break until the third movement, though the melancholy depths of its legato, overlapping phrases hardly posed a relief.
The final movement featured a Klezmer-like melody, a nod to the suffering of the Jewish people during the war. Strumming the cello like a kind of guitar, Eldan offered churning arm movements more typical of a rock star. His moves prompted some benevolent chuckles from the audience, but they produced a fittingly abrasive tone. In what was perhaps the most disturbing moment of the entire piece, Bowlin and Eldan strummed an out-of-place major chord to close the Trio, leaving audiences in a state of rattled stupefaction.
Graciously, the Oberlin Trio didn’t leave us in that moment of ruminative crisis, but delivered some rather more optimistic Dvořák to finish the concert. The players smoothly maneuvered the twists and turns of his alternately contemplative and lively Trio in E Minor. In one of the most surprising but delightful moments of the piece, Bowlin and Eldan’s impeccably synchronized trills in the fifth movement sounded like the ringing of an old-fashioned phone—a metallic ringtone we should be so lucky as to be able to download onto our cell phones.
The Oberlin Trio will repeat this program for their upcoming single-concert tour in Seoul, South Korea. They should travel confidently: The concert is spectacular, and like the Oberlin audience, viewers in Seoul will surely be moved to their feet.