What if your favorite composers had all grown up together? For one illuminating evening at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, this was so.
Johannes Brahms was born a generation before Alexander Zemlinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, but last Tuesday’s program in Barbro Osher Recital Hall, which featured an early work by each composer, collapsed the years between. In a greater sense, that’s the way of SFCM’s chamber music program, where graduate students get the chance to play alongside experienced professionals — this time, members of Harvard University’s Parker Quartet.
In Brahms’s Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor, famous for its flashy Hungarian-style finale, pianist Yi-Chen Feng especially stood out. The three student musicians (playing with the Parker’s Jessica Bodner on viola) were all technically impressive. But most rewarding in this performance of the piece were the touches of elegance in quieter sections — the wispy 16th notes in the first movement’s development, for example, and the restrained shapes of the brooding Intermezzo. Though balance is often a problem in this piece — and in Osher, a windowed space that looks better than it sounds — these young musicians pulled it off.
Some 30 years later, in 1896, Zemlinsky wrote a practically perfect First String Quartet: concise, idiomatic, and more than a little like Brahms, who understandably became one of the younger composer’s staunchest supporters.
At first, this performance by the Parker Quartet was, like the piece itself, rather temperate. The slow movement in particular wanted for something — ferocity on the stark rhythmic unisons, maybe, or more space for sentimentality in the melodies. But the finale, marked Vivace e con fuoco, brought the bravura: The playing here was nuanced and self-assured.
In the 1920s, Schoenberg would make his mark with 12-tone serialism, but before that, over a span of just three weeks in 1899, he wrote Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured night), a sumptuous string sextet that can’t help but upstage whatever else is on the program. This instrumentation — two violins, two violas, and two cellos — was famously exploited by Brahms, but Schoenberg took the genre to new heights a generation later. His figuration is almost impossibly thick, his motifs overlap to the point of oblivion, and tonality hangs by a thread.
It’s not easy music to play, but under the guidance of three Parker musicians (first violinist Daniel Chong, second violinist Ken Hamao on second viola, and cellist Kee-Hyun Kim), the three SFCM students very much rose to the occasion. Kudos to violinist Shintaro Taneda, cellist Ayoun Alexandra Kim, and especially violist Isabel Tannenbaum on her many exposed solos. The timings were nimble, the blend seamless. Much of the performance had a breathless quality as the music swung from despair to elation.
These glorious sounds, in fact, got the composer in trouble. He based Verklärte on a poem by Richard Dehmel whose theme of premarital sex was at the time provocative. Little did the critics know that Schoenberg was just getting started.
