by John W. Lambert
September 7, 2007, Chapel Hill, NC: One summer, during high school,
I worked for an expatriate German music lover who lived on Long Island,
NY. With help from his Pennsylvania Dutch wife, Frank handled dogs
for a living, visiting A.K.C. championship shows. He also talked about — and
listened to — music as much as he could. There was plenty to
hear in NY then, live and on the radio, too; he had very few recordings
because he didn't need them. He was given to reminiscing, as people
of a certain age seemed, to these then-young ears, wont to do. In his
homeland, as a teenager, he had "collected" the Beethoven
symphonies, which he "amassed" by taking the train or in
some cases walking to various nearby towns and villages where rare
live performances were mounted. When he'd finally heard all nine, he
felt his young life was complete.
There were some parallels for a teenager, growing up in NC at the time,
although we didn't walk from town to town for concerts. There was the
Met on the radio, and WPTF broadcast classical music on its new FM
station several times a week. We had some good choirs in the region
and our state orchestra and lots of college and university artists
(including UNC pianist and teacher William S. Newman) and amateurs,
too; there were concerts being offered by the Raleigh Chamber Music
Guild and the Chamber Arts Society; and some of the world's greatest
orchestras had begun appearing here, thanks
to
NC
State's
Friends of
the College
Series....
Still,
it was easy enough to identify with Frank, and indeed it was years
before we heard all the Beethoven symphonies here or even
all the concerti, for that matter, and never mind all the violin sonatas
or all the string
quartets. Back then, if you wanted to get to know this music,
you pretty much had to read music or rely on records.
Little has changed, although there's a lot less music in the public
schools, and fewer and fewer people can play music for themselves,
except by turning on the radio or putting on records or CDs. In addition,
the flood of outstanding visiting orchestras has dwindled to a paltry
trickle, leaving the field to mid-sized regional bands that seek to
catapult themselves to importance with unending marketing hype about
how great they are — or how great they want to be....
Through it all, however, there were recordings, and many would agree
that reliance on them is not at all a bad thing. One can learn a lot
by listening, and one can become familiar with vast amounts of repertory
that way, thus preparing for those live performances that dot our cultural
landscape.
And recordings can serve as calling cards for artists, too, helping
them introduce themselves and their art to the public. Thus it was,
back in 1999, while writing for Fanfare (in large measure,
in order to expand my personal library), that I "discovered" the Abegg
Trio, by means of their
four CDs devoted to Beethoven's
piano trios.
These performances were revelations to me, thanks to the superior sound
quality of the recordings, the astonishing sonority of the Bösendorfer
piano used, the playing of these inspired and inspiring artists, and
their interpretations, graced but never occluded by scholarship resulting
from years and years of study and performance together.
This last bit may be among the Abegg Trio's most amazing and impressive
qualities: for 31 years, the ensemble has performed, mostly in Europe,
with never a change in personnel. As a result, the artists — pianist
Gerrit Zitterbart, violinist Ulrich Beetz (whose instrument is by Nicholas
Lupot, 1821), and cellist Birgit Erichson (Andrea Castagnieri, 1747) — really
do "play as one," to borrow a phrase too often bandied about
in connection with regional orchestral string sections and the like.
Toss in the Abegg Trio's members' individual technical precision, their
interpretive excellence, and their long study of these scores, and
you've got something truly special. Beethoven's works have in a sense
become the ensemble's calling card, for they've played the individual
trios numerous times and given the entire cycle, in three or more substantial
concerts, 27 times. (They also played these works all in the same
day — once — in
their 25th anniversary year!) And to state the obvious, if it hadn't
been for recordings — CDs — chances are we would never
have heard the Abegg Trio over here, in America, since we'd probably
never have heard of them.
The Abegg Trio's Beethoven CDs were so remarkable that I started trying
to interest chamber music presenters in bringing them to the United
States to perform the cycle. But in 1999, there were two major obstacles:
the closest Bösendorfer dealer was in Atlanta, too remote to haul
one in for a concert; and the artists didn't have US management. They
still don't, but their Canadian representative knows the US ropes.
And Richard
Ruggero
now represents Bösendorfer pianos in Raleigh.
When the Abegg Trio performed here (and on the NC coast) the last time,
in the spring of 2005, our critics were enthusiastic,
so it was logical for the presenter, the Raleigh
Chamber Music Guild, to
seek a way to get them to come back to America. The die was cast when
Duke Performances' Chamber Arts Society and the UNC Music Department's William
S. Newman Artists Series agreed
to join forces with the Guild to present the Abegg Trio's first full
Beethoven cycle in America during the 2007 September Prelude — the
Triangle-wide event that marks the real start of the season for chamber
music enthusiasts in central North Carolina. (For the record, the Abegg
Trio's NC debut took place 20 years ago, at the Reynolda House, in
Winston-Salem.)
Thus it was with keen anticipation that we entered UNC's Memorial Hall
on the evening of September 7 for the first of these three programs,
offered as part of the William S. Newman Artists Series (named in memory
of the aforementioned UNC pianist and scholar). On the stage was Carolina
Performing Arts' Hamburg Steinway, a fine instrument. (An American
Steinway was to be heard at Duke, and a glistening Bösendorfer
figured in the final concert, in Raleigh.) The bill of fare in Chapel
Hill was unusual in that all the works (including, as it turned out,
the encore)
were
in E-flat: the Variations, Op. 44; the Piano Trios Nos. 1 (Op. 1/1)
and 5 (Op. 70/2), and the rarely-heard single-movement Triosatz, Hess
48.
Newman Series coordinator and violinist Richard Luby offered welcoming
remarks, and the audience clearly sensed how special was the moment
as the artists came onto the stage, acknowledged the applause, and
sat down to begin. In a nutshell, the Abegg Trio delivered, in every
sense of the word, playing even more brilliantly and with even stronger
ensemble than on their recordings. They also observed every sanctioned
repeat, thus presenting Beethoven's music as it is not always heard.
Now a lot of water has gone over and through the dam since the Abegg
Trio was last in Raleigh, for the musicians have embraced even more
than before the "original instruments" movement, and they
have made several CDs using historic instruments. (In the mill, indeed,
are new recordings of all the Beethoven works for piano trio, including
Op. 11 — in both clarinet and violin editions.) These forays
into older performance practice have, in turn, informed the ensemble's
playing on modern instruments, so the renditions heard in Chapel Hill
were, if anything, more refined and often clearer and more cleanly
articulated than on those CDs. This demonstrates once again a paramount
quality that distinguishes the Abegg Trio from many of its peers: every
time they take up a work, no matter how many times they've played it,
they go over it as if they were performing it for the very first time.
It keeps the music alive and fresh, of course — and it makes
hearing the group worthwhile, since every performance possesses slightly
different interpretive and technical nuances. Again and again the artists
impressed with the beauty of their phrasing and their astonishing ability
to match and seamlessly join violin and cello tone (to the point that
as lines passed back and forth it was often impossible to tell, except
by looking, which string instrument was being played).
Such was the case in Memorial Hall, as the September Prelude series
got underway. It was an auspicious beginning, despite some serious
problems with the impact of the ensemble in the large auditorium, surely
exacerbated by the fact that the artists were fairly far back on the
(foreshortened) stage and did not enjoy the added "thrust" that
a small, directional shell would have provided. This was however both
curse and blessing, for it obliged the audience to listen intently,
perhaps even more intently than would otherwise have been the case.
One could have heard pins drop during much of the concert — and
the listening was richly rewarded as the visitors gave grandly shaded
performances. To cite only two examples, the soft, slow movement of
Op. 70/2 was, in a word, ethereal, and in contrast the finale of this
trio exploded in the hall like a lightning bolt.
Alas however, as would be conclusively demonstrated during the other
two concerts, Chapel Hill is, at the moment, in some difficulty with
regard to acceptable performance spaces for chamber groups, for Memorial
Hall, which is basically o.k. for orchestras and bands, is simply too
big for small ensembles, and never mind how it looks when the typical
Triangle chamber music audience is scattered throughout its 1,400 seats....
The following day brought a chamber music workshop
for adult amateurs, coached by leading area professional musicians
and capped by masterclasses
with the Abegg Trio. Space doesn't permit a full discussion here,
but I must note that a recurring theme, repeatedly articulated by
all three
visiting artists, was the concept of singing, an essential ingredient
in superior performances of all kinds of music, instrumental as well
as vocal!
Our coverage continues with follow-on reports
from our colleagues Jeffrey Rossman and Martha A. Fawbush. Stay tuned
for their updates
on parts two
and three of this special journey with the exceptional Abegg Trio.
