The New Face of Classical Music

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The New York Sun

Fulton Ferry Landing always teems with life, mixed with the ghost of Walt Whitman, lines from whose poetry are forged into the iron railings, and the victims of September 11, 2001, whose spirits forever hover just across the river. Sunday afternoon, Bedrich Smetana’s febrile Piano Trio was the centerpiece of an impassioned program of chamber works aboard Brooklyn’s Bargemusic, moored at the landing. Even in the rain, a rock band was wrapping up a performance just in time to restore a sense of watery tranquility as a backdrop.

Three very experienced musicians presented three exceptional trios. Violinist Ilya Kaler is a professor at DePaul, while cellist Eugene Osadchy and pianist Daredjan Baya Kakouberi both teach in Texas. All three are émigrés from the former Soviet Union, a place of seemingly limitless hordes of fine musicians who have blanketed Western Europe, America, and Latin America in recent years with high quality music-making and a deeply ingrained sense of Classical tradition. When I hear the nattering naysayers proclaim the death of serious music, I am comforted by the fact that they tend to look no further than the MTV generation of the West and ignore the grassroots of Eastern Europe and East Asia. Classical music is alive and well — it simply has a new face.

What distinguished the reading of the Smetana was its unbridled passion. The work opens with a stormy passage for solo violin, and Mr. Kaler made the most of it. He has a brilliant tone and a huge voice, almost too powerful for such a small room as the barge. Unrelentingly, Smetana follows this beginning statement with an equally intense Romantic essay at the keyboard. Ms. Kakouberi exhibited her ability to think and communicate in big gestures, unabashedly intoning these crashing chords with majesty and intensity. The work is also very daring harmonically, anticipating some of the more experimental modulations of Debussy by a quarter of a century.These three players performed with white-hot passion throughout, reminding me of a superb realization of the Piano Quintet of Cesar Franck. The final Presto was a wild ride indeed.

The concert opened with a sprightly and nimble run through of Mozart’s Piano Trio in B flat Major, K.254. This is really a violin sonata with piano accompaniment and cello obbligato, and Mr. Kaler was impressive in his variety of tone and touch, an extremely important bag of tricks in what could otherwise sound a lot like an exercise in major scale regurgitation. Ms. Kakouberi was not always note perfect in her underpinnings, but proved overall a pleasant curtain raiser.

Finally, the group offered Antonín Dvorÿák’s Piano Trio in F minor, op. 65. This was very fine music making, as the group caught the odd rhythms of the Allegro ma non troppo and the Allegretto grazioso perfectly. Featuring not exactly syncopation, but rather two distinct beats attracting and repelling each other in a signature folkdance way, the music alternated between sounding purposely a bit clumsy and highly graceful. The czardas makes its whirling appearance as this ethnomusicological survey progresses to a frenetic conclusion midway through the piece. The trio captured and controlled these wild rhythms masterfully, and I noticed more than one audience member exhibiting, as Nietzsche used to say, a nodding acquaintance with the music.

Finally Mr. Osadchy performed a marvelous passage, the opening theme of the Poco adagio of the Dvorÿák’s. This cellist possesses a very rich tone, which nicely complimented the more strident violin sound of his partner this day. Mr. Osadchy employs generous doses of vibrato and also a strong-handed pizzicato technique. And, like the other two players on the platform, he is steeped in the great tradition. It’s good to know that there are ardent keepers of the flame right here in Brooklyn.


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