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| Elena Bashkirova (Courtesy JICMF) |
Established in 1998 by pianist Elena Bashkirova and
Adv. Yehezkel Beinisch, the annual Jerusalem International Chamber Music
Festival features renowned musicians together with outstanding upcoming younger
artists performing in diverse combinations of instruments. This writer attended
the 2023 festival’s opening event on September 5th at the Jerusalem
International YMCA. With each festival choosing a theme, that of the 2023 event
(September 5th to 10th) focused on migrant composers. The displacement of
composers in the 20th century, prompted by such constraints as antisemitism or
political persecution, with other composers seeking work or financial security,
has given rise to new styles in the language of musical repertoire.
Following words of welcome from Yehezkel Beinisch
(chairman, JICMF board), the festival took off on a stellar start with Gustav
Mahler's Piano Quartet in A minor, the work comprising only the first movement of
an abandoned piano quartet written by Mahler when a student at the Vienna
Conservatory, this piece ending up as the composer's sole surviving
instrumental chamber work. The artists (violinist Clara-Jumi Kang, violist
Adrien La Marca, 'cellist Tim Park, pianist Yulianna Avdeeva) gave insight into
the creative processes of the 16-year-old Mahler, as they wholeheartedly
addressed his early encounter with matters of musical form and texture. They
probed the work's lush, singing beauty, its uneven phrases, complex dissonances
and mood changes, inviting its ominous and foreboding moments and
passionately rhapsodic character to dictate tempo flexibility. Kang led
masterfully and expressively, with Avdeeva subtly endorsing the piece’s dramatic
intensity and disquiet via the piano's lower harmonies. In 1907, Mahler
migrated to America, hopeful of a new phase in his career, attracted by a
lighter conducting schedule, more time to compose and lavish monetary
earnings.
In 1850, Johannes Brahms met the Hungarian
violinist Ede Reményi, then to accompany him in a number of recitals over the
next few years. This was the composer’s introduction to gypsy-style music,
which was later to inspire his most lucrative and popular compositions - the
two sets of "Hungarian Dances" (pub.1869, 1880). Playing a selection
of Book 1 WoO1, a true festival treat was provided by French-born Nathalia
Milstein and Russian-born Yulianna Avdeeva. Performing the pieces in their
original setting (4 hands, 1 piano) the young artists captured the spontaneity and passion of Hungarian
gypsy music in playing that was clean, fresh, nuanced, at times majestic, at
others, poignant, with much dancelike joy and a touch of whimsy. Their playing
took on board the timbral variety and rich "orchestration" of the
4-hand piano genre, as they contrasted intimate, pared-down moments with
exhilarating tutti, to the enjoyment of the audience.
And to the very different “mise en scene”
of Violin Sonata No.4, Op.39, by Polish-born Jewish composer/pianist
Mieczysław Weinberg (1919–96). Weinberg’s flight from Nazi-occupied Europe was
rather different from the customary exile to the West. His move to the Soviet
Union in 1939 meant a second period of threat and discrimination under
Stalin. He was to live out the rest of his days in Russia, first unjustly
neglected but eventually enjoying considerable success as one of his adopted
country’s most celebrated and frequently performed composers, especially during
the 1960s and 1970s. At the Jerusalem concert, Weinberg's Violin Sonata No.4
(1947) was played by German-born Clara-Jumi Kang and Nathalia Milstein.
Alternately sombre and hectic, Weinberg's musical idiom stylistically mixes
traditional- and contemporary forms, combining a freely tonal, individual
language (inspired by Shostakovich) with ethnic (Jewish, Polish, Moldovan)
influences and a unique sense of form, harmony and colour. Performing with
unstinting discipline and dedication, Kang's playing produced pure,
unforced sounds at all levels of dynamics, with breathtaking virtuosity in the
fast perpetuum mobile section of the central movement. Milstein proved to
be the ideal partner, both in approach and ability. Their performance of
Weinberg’s slow-fast-slow structure gave a transparent reading of the
composer’s ideas, highlighting the substantial solo sections for each
instrument.
Mahler's 1901-2 settings of five poems of Romantic
German poet Friedrich Rückert, composed in one of the happiest periods of the
composer's life, do not constitute a song cycle. In fact, deciding the order
they are to be performed is left to the artists. At the Jerusalem concert, we
heard the songs sung by German soprano Dorothea Röschmann, with Elena
Bashkirova at the piano. The artists' mutual engagement, their focus on the
texts and on the distinctively otherworldly atmosphere permeating the
"Rückert-Lieder" emerged via the transparency, fragility, understatement
and the sensitive pacing of each song. As they conjured up sensations of love,
scents, night ponderings, indeed, "the feeling that fills us right up to
our lips but does not pass them” (in Mahler's own words) Röschmann used the
sounds and shapes of words to endorse their meaning.
In the 1880s, when in his mid-fifties, Brahms
retired from composing, believing he had exhausted his creative powers.
However, it was hearing performances of clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld
(1856-1907) in the Meiningen Court Orchestra that inspired him to resume
composing. The Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op.115, written in the twilight of
his career, concluded the 2023 Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival's
opening concert, the performance bringing together five artists from different
corners of Europe: clarinettist Pablo Barragán, violinists Rainer Honeck and
Maria Ioudenitch, violist Adrien La Marca and 'cellist Ivan Karizna. Drawing
attention to its dark tonal hues, lush textures and sweeping, cantabile vocal
lines, the virtuosic "gypsy" section (2nd movement) and to the
brilliant variations of the fourth movement, the artists gave expression to the
quintet's poetic beauty, deep introspection, yearning, and melancholy as
well as to Brahms' consummate writing for the clarinet and chamber ensemble
medium. Young Pablo Barragán's playing underscored the piece's underlying depth
of sadness, also celebrating its moments of rhapsodic, wild gestures and
flickering textures.
This was an evening of excellent programming,
matched by outstanding performance!