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| Music: Trout, Enjoying Opera | Chapter & Verse |
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Cellist Yo-Yo Ma '76, D.Mus. '91, has long been one of the best known
musical members of the Harvard community for his performances and recordings
of the concerto repertoire. Here he has brought together eminent colleagues
to present two of the most loved of Schubert's chamber works. Annotator
Mark Salzman draws an analogy to basketball's Dream Team-unnecessary hyperbole
for superb performances which should find an audience without it.
Most prominent of Ma's fellow stars is pianist Emanuel Ax, prolific in the
recording studio. Violinist Pamela Frank has recorded Beethoven for Musicmasters,
Schubert for Sony, and contemporary composer Aaron Jay Kernis for Argo.
Bassist Edgar Meyer has recorded a variety of jazz outings for Windham Hill
and MCA. Violist Rebecca Young seems to be new to discs. Together they produce
a delightful "Trout."
The quintet includes a set of variations on Schubert's early song by that
name as its fourth movement, and, rather untypically, includes a double
bass as the fourth string instrument. The piano and violin parts are first
among equals here; Ax shines with crystalline passagework and unforced beauty
of tone, no matter what the dynamic level, and Frank produces a lovely sweet
cantabile. The inner parts sparkle, and Meyer provides a warm foundation.
The "Arpeggione" sonata survives as part of the active repertory
only in transcription. Here it is rendered (and how!) on violoncello. Schubert
wrote the work for the arpeggione or bowed guitar, an instrument invented
by the Viennese Johann Georg Staufer in 1823, but belonging to the older
tradition of the baryton, that late member of the gamba family for which
Haydn wrote so many works. Both the arpeggione and the baryton shared a
fretted fingerboard and tuning in fourths and a third. Schubert's creation
for the instrument is entrancing, elegiac, and bittersweet, with the focus
almost exclusively on the melody instrument. Ma has found a special tone
for his cello in this work, capturing its essential melancholy.
Of the various genres belonging to the Western musical tradition, grand
opera is perhaps the most foreign to English-speaking listeners. Practically
every European nation gave high priority to establishing an operatic tradition
in its own tongue. England, alas, was the exception. After some promising
beginnings in Purcell's time, foreign-language opera took over with Handel's
advent, and has held sway ever since. Any works in the vernacular are doomed
to be considered frivolous-not in the same league with the imported product.
All this means that most American operagoers, unlike their counterparts
in other lands, are expected to appreciate the beauties of the operatic
repertory only through a glass, darkly.