A Matter of Gestation

Avner Dorman is an Israeli composer who is currently studying for his doctorate at the Juilliard School. He has aspirations in the rock music arena as well. His String Quartet No. 2 was given its New York premiere on Saturday evening at the 92nd Street Y by the Jerusalem Quartet.The work, subtitled “Mirage,” was ethnomusicologically interesting, musically less so.The first movement includes snippets of Indian raga and rhythms of the type of Persian classical music banned by the ayatollahs. Although Mr. Dorman’s use of the stringed instruments as if they were percussions was a bit cliched, this finger drumming worked well enough for the composer to get away with it. While the second movement was being written, Muslim murderers butchered the children of Beslan, Russia. Mr. Dorman, already working on a lament of supplication, titled this section “Prayer for the Innocents.” The third section, “Ruchot,” purports to be descriptive of desert winds and, as a corollary, the transitory quality of existence.The members of the quartet – Alexander Pavlovsky and Sergei Bresler, violins; Amihai Grosz, viola; Kyril Zlotnikov, cello – had commissioned the effort and certainly put their all into its presentation. I, too, really wanted to like this piece, since it was clear that the composer was sincere in his emotions. However, his communicative abilities are not very well developed,and the work seemed patently obvious and a bit self-involved.The program booklet mentioned that Mr. Dorman is a student of John Corigliano. Perhaps he has simply picked up a little too much of his teacher’s superficial Hollywood manipulation: The desert music was straight out of “Lawrence of Arabia.” Mr. Dorman was present for a celebratory bow.It was easy to see why the Jerusalem players chose the String Quartet Op. 11 of Samuel Barber as a companion piece.The structure of the two works is identical.Barber begins with a relatively long first movement, and follows with an emotional slow movement, which then leads to a shorter, faster conclusion. This second movement has established a life of its own as the Adagio for Strings and has, in fact, eclipsed all of Barber’s other works.The Adagio lives just on the razor’s edge between sentiment and sentimentality, and it is only Barber’s muscularity that keeps it from descending into the maudlin. Although written without program, the stand-alone version was played on the radio at the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and has never looked back. It was omnipresent immediately after September 11, 2001. It is a tricky piece to present without seeming to pander.This quartet solves the problem of potential treacle by presenting the sorrowful theme a little lighter and faster than normal, and a bit dispassionately. Confronting the material more as music and less as accompaniment to an unnamed tragedy allowed the quartet to settle in to its business unencumbered. The resultant performance was first-rate.The ubiquitous Benjamin Hochman joined for a reading of Brahms’s Piano Quintet. Mr. Hochman has been busy in his New York year. I have heard him at Alice Tully Hall, Rose Studio, the Good Shepherd Church, and now the Y. Also an Israeli, he has shown remarkable power at the keyboard and a good deal of tastefulness and command. But this performance was a bit wan for such a granitic masterpiece as Brahms’s Op.34.The members of the quartet pro duced the thinnest and most translucent of ensemble sounds, sometimes even blending as if they were intoning Debussy.This was discordant with the weighty thoughts of the composer. Mr. Hochman seemed to adapt by holding himself in check, so that the overall balance of the five was fine, just inappropriate.Ultimately, the shortcomings of the Jerusalem Quartet may simply be a matter of gestation. They’ve been together for over a decade, but they may need another 10 years to achieve full maturation. Empirical evidence indicates that it will be worth the wait.***Attempting to pick a favorite among Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas may be a fool’s errand, but this fool does have a nominee for best work of the early period: the A-flat major, Op. 26. Along with the Piano Concerto No. 3, this represents the beginning of 19th-century music, both literally and emblematically. Not only were both works composed in 1801, but they moved away from the simplicity of Mozart to inaugurate a new era of complexity that would intensify throughout the 1800s. This pivotal sonata opened the recital of Martin Kasik on Thursday evening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Mr. Kasik is from the Czech Republic and was first presented here in town by the Young Concert Artists. His current program was very well thought-out, interpretively impressive, and reasonably well-executed. However, were he a gymnast, he would definitely lose points for some of his landings.Leaving aside some of his errors of enthusiasm, Mr. Kasik demonstrated a light and polychromatic touch in the opening variation movement. This is the commencement of Beethoven’s serving notice of complexity, a fullfledged set of variations within a sonata. Mr. Kasik followed up with strong-handed high-spiritedness in the Scherzo and established an exciting backdrop for the third-movement funeral march “on the death of a hero.” These are the sketches for the famous “Eroica” second movement, and Mr. Kasik created a solid sense of gravitas with a stately tempo and firm touch. The final Allegro was a fine example of klangfarben – a tone painting leading to a mischievously quiet conclusion.Another early sonata, the D major, Op. 10, No. 3, was also meaningfully played. Rather atypically for an artist of his young years, Mr. Kasik seems especially adept at slow movements, and he built a prodigious edifice to hold the Largo e mesto movement of this otherwise exuberant essay. Like the first sonata, this work ends surprisingly quietly, and Mr. Kasik seemed to revel in its dynamic contrast.There was also some Schubert on the program: the four Impromptus of Op. 90. But the shape of this recital became clear when Mr. Kasik began Beethoven’s Six Variations in F major, Op. 34. While that opening sonata contains an entire set of variations, this set of variations morphs into a de facto two movement sonata, what Beethoven might have called a “sonata quasi una fantasia.” Mr. Kasik was powerfully conversant with this specific variation form, subtly altering rhythms and tempi for colorful effect. After the more standard variants have been traversed, Beethoven then adds a mini funeral march and a complete Adagio. Mozart’s veneer of simplicity is gone forever.My lasting impression of this pianist is that he has an understanding of the import of these pieces that is refreshingly beyond his years. He simply needs to wait for his fingers to catch up.A final thought about this recital: The most sought-after seats at any piano evening are those, stage right (“on the keyboard side”), that allow patrons to observe the action of the artist’s fingers and can lead to increased understanding of the structure of the compositions being performed. At this event, part of the museum’s Piano Forte series, the Steinway was far to the stageleft side, allowing many more of us to observe Mr. Kasik’s dexterity.This is an excellent idea and a noble experiment. The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium is small enough to accommodate this positioning acoustically, and I moved my seat after each piece to take the temperature in different sections of the hall. More venues might try a similar configuration for maximum musical impact in the future.

A Matter of Gestation

A Matter of Gestation

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