The Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society’s intimate concert in a small studio above the big and better known halls was three quarters a memorial (in a sense) and three quarters works by female composers. But it resisted the need for banners, presenting a dramatic through-line in four pieces stretching to 90 minutes as simply Sonic Spectrum II.
Jessie Montgomery's Musings for Two Violins, in its premiere performance, opened the evening, ranging from rapid string crossings to rapid strumming to a canon and inspirations from bird flocking and a lullaby, sometimes dizzying in its velocity, as if Paul Huang and Danbi Um were rushing to a common conclusion. The six brief musings provided a setting for the drama to come. In particular, Lera Auerbach’s Sonata no. 2 for violin and piano, Op.63 (2001), bearing the simple, powerful inscription “September 11”. Um said she had heard the piece performed and was “shocked, overwhelmed and uncomfortable” by it. She and Mika Sasaki brought as much to their performance. It was at once chaotic and virtuosic, full of hyper-speed mood swings. Um approached the piece with determination and musculature. Her violin commanded attention, the piano in the first half of the single movement almost as if there to provide consolation, but eventually getting caught up in itself. It seemed a piece about not knowing what to think, about being unable to process facts and feelings. It moved without warning or rationale between fury and bereavement but was altogether sorrowful, interpolating America the Beautiful in isolation, broken and incomplete, and returning to that theme at the conclusion.
Chris Rogerson composed his Afterword for Two Violins and Piano in 2020, after the passing of famed soprano Jessye Norman, taking inspiration from her recording of Strauss’ Four Last Songs. It was almost a relief to have simple sadness after the panoply of emotions in the Auerbach, like being given permission to grieve whatever loss one might be feeling in a sort of unabashed sentiment perhaps more fashionable in Strauss’ time than today. The violins (Huang and Um) soared together, Sasaki’s piano watchful, just below, then overtaking, creating an uncommon geometry of two strings accompanying the piano and, in a sense, coming to seem as if it were not just about loss but about survival together, despite.
The final composition wasn’t an elegy but, in a sense, served as one. Light and Matter was Kaija Saariaho’s first piano trio, written when she was well established for her use of electronics and less orthodox instrumental arrangements, and was played here by cellist Nicholas Canellakis (who gave its premiere in 2014) with Huang and Sasaki. The Finnish composer died in June 2023, at the age of 70, and was a frequent presence in New York. She wrote the trio in her Upper Manhattan apartment while watching the passing light in Morningside Park. Saariaho could be a very literal composer; the trio began at the low end of the piano, the cello soon joining in the register, as if pre-dawn light before the rays of the violin glimmered through the trees. The image was detailed quite wonderfully with false harmonics in the strings and soft strums inside the piano case.
There was an intensity not just to the music presented but in the programming itself, from the simple observations of Montgomery’s duets to the conclusion, seeming to hold out promise that, whatever else happens, the sun will still rise tomorrow.
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