Works of Bach, Schoenberg and Brahms in Concert No.3 of the 2022 Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival

Dmitry Sitkovetsky (courtesy Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival)

 

Once again, the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival was here to provide music-lovers with late-summer enjoyment, its excitement and energy drawing large crowds and filling the auditorium of the Jerusalem International YMCA to capacity. The 25th Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival (artistic director: Elena Bashkirova) took place September 5th-10th, 2022. Arriving at the venue, one was greeted by Jerusalem's balmy evening breezes and the magical carillon sounds emanating from the YMCA bell tower, as Gaby Shefler entertained festival-goers with a selection of familiar melodies.

 

The Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival boasts its very own distinctive features. One is that it brings together musicians from all over the world - young artists performing on stage with more veteran musicians. Another is its concert programming, with each concert offering new- or seldom-performed works and, in some cases, offering a different slant on familiar pieces, all these alongside the canon of chamber music repertoire. Concert No.3 (September 7th) was no exception. It opened with six of J.S.Bach's Three-Part Inventions, BWV 787-801, as set for violin, viola and 'cello by Dmitry Sitkovetsky. Performing them were Sitkovetsky (violin), Hartmut Rohde (viola) and Xenia Jankovic on 'cello. So many of us have studied these 3-part keyboard Inventions (or Sinfonias) in our youth, then to revisit them later with a wider perspective. For the minor-key inventions, Sitkovetsky chose slow tempi, tempi that might not be effective on the harpsichord, but here, on strings, resulting in poetic, lyrical playing that gave prominence to each and every motif. As to the inventions in major keys, the trio members let down their hair to perform them with contrapuntal pizzazz, inviting the listener to follow how Bach plays out the subject matter in each. These perfectly-chiselled jewels, the very same notes that Bach had penned, but seen through the prism of the string player, made for a splendid opener to the concert. 

 

Arnold Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon Op.41 for narrator, string quartet and piano would not be a work often performed on these shores, if at all. Composed during World War II as a protest against tyranny, Lord Byron's poem castigating Napoleon served the composer in expressing his own feelings. An impelling and turbulent piece, rich in motifs and written in the manner of inflected speech (resembling Sprechstimme) Schoenberg makes several references to Beethoven. Conducted by Sitkovetsky, the artists displayed fine-tuned teamwork. Presenting the 12-tone score with feisty precision, the instrumentalists (Nathalia Milstein-piano, violinists Yamen Saadi and Mohamed Hiber, Hartmut Rohde-viola, Astrig Siranossian-'cello), together with narrator (baritone) Dietrich Henschel, brought out the work's compelling message, its sarcasm and scorn. Schoenberg had insisted that the narrator must have "the number of shades, essential to express one hundred and seventy kinds of derision, sarcasm, hatred, ridicule, contempt, condemnation, etc., which I have tried to portray in my music." Henschel did not disappoint, presenting the work's compelling message in a performance that was indeed gripping, resonant and genuinely theatrical.

 

These items were followed by three works of Johannes Brahms.  "Zwei Gesänge" Op.91, published 1884, had a strange genesis - to mend the marriage of violinist Joseph Joachim and wife mezzo-soprano Amalie Weiss (both musical partners of Brahms and personal friends), due to Joachim’s paranoid delusions about an affair he imagined Amalie was having with Fritz August Simrock, Brahms’ publisher. Performing the two songs at the Jerusalem concert were soprano Dorothea Röschmann, Razvan Popovici-viola and Sunwook Kim (piano), their beautifully balanced reading of “Gestillte Sehnsucht” (Longing at Rest, Rückert) and “Geistliches Wiegenlied” (Sacred Lullaby, Geibel) - both songs sharing the image of wind in trees, calming in the first and alarming in the second - sensitive, dynamic and evocative. With fine-sculpted musical gestures, Popovici constantly reached out to interact with Röschmann's poignant singing and beauty of timbre. 

 

In the late summer months of 1865, having left Vienna for a working vacation in Baden, near the Black Forest, Brahms rented an apartment with mountain views and began to imagine the Horn Trio while walking in the woods. His mother, Christiane, had died the previous February in Hamburg. The Trio in E-flat major for horn, violin and piano Op.40 brings together three instruments the composer had played as a young man. (Despite his great love for the instrument, Brahms only engaged the horn in one chamber music work.)  What quickly became clear at the Jerusalem concert was how wholly and naturally the three young outstanding artists - Ben Goldscheider-horn, Clara Jumi-Kang-violin and Nathalia Milstein - had delved into the musical and emotional meaning of this nostalgic and strangely modern piece, identifying with its controlled sentimentality, its agitated and impetuous moments, its urgent gestures, elegiac expressiveness and Romantic warmth. Ben Goldscheider wields the unforgiving horn with easeful mastery and richness of timbre. 

 

The event signed out with Brahms' Piano Quintet in F-minor Op.34, a dark, mighty work of huge scope, often considered to be Brahms' great chamber music epic, though completed when he was only thirty-one. Performing it here were violinists Dmitry Sitkovetsky and Mohamad Hiber, Gérard Caussé-viola, Tim Park-'cello and Sunwook Kim-piano. With both piano and strings playing an equally important role throughout this work, the artists created the whole-of-Brahms emotional journey in playing that was personal, lyrical, mysterious, fresh and with some subtly-flexed touches.