Chamber Music

It is foolish to wade into the mild controversy currently surrounding the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, but I have never been afraid of appearing foolish. It kind of goes with the territory.

The controversy, typical of our day and age, surrounds how much new music, as well as music by under-represented groups, is played at a given concert. CMS has chosen to stick with its tried-and-true formula of introducing great and sometimes obscure pieces from the past four or five hundred years, without paying much attention to who wrote them. For this they have been chastised by the New York Times and others.

The part of their attitude I want to defend wholeheartedly—and it lies at the center of their defense—is that great music is for everyone, no matter who wrote it. They illustrate it by having a range of performers, old and young, black and white, Asian and non-Asian, famous and unknown, present the pieces on their programs.

Which are, granted, mainly by dead white men. I do not have a problem with this, because if I want another kind of music, there are plenty of venues where I can seek it out. Not everybody has to do everything; not everybody has to adhere to the latest preferred strictures at once. There is still room in our world, I hope, for the wayward and the exceptional, and CMS has long been good at introducing me to composers I know nothing or little about. The virtue of this is that I never actually know what I am going to like until I encounter it live, and they have repeatedly given me this opportunity.

A case in point is the CMS concert I attended last Sunday—my first return to Alice Tully Hall in twenty months. The program was called “Spanish Inspirations,” and I was drawn to it by three things: the inclusion of a Shostakovich work I had never heard, and the presence of two musicians (Nicholas Canellakis on cello, Anne-Marie McDermott on piano) whose performances I have always loved.

Canellakis and McDermott were terrific, as usual. But the Shostakovich was surprisingly disappointing. His amalgam of “Spanish Songs for Voice and Piano,” first performed in 1956, must have been the kind of sappy melodic stuff he occasionally produced to get himself back into favor, because there was nothing Shostakovich-like about it. If you had played the piece to me without attribution, I would have thought it was movie music by some unknown composer; I would never in a million years have guessed it was by the same man who composed my favorite modern string quartets.

In contrast, the rewarding parts of the concert lay in the things I didn’t know anything about and therefore hadn’t necessarily planned on enjoying. Chief among these was the performance by the young baritone, Will Liverman, who sang in both the Shostakovich songs and a work by Ravel called “Don Quichotte à Dulcinée.” Those who are more in the know than I am may recognize his name from the cast of Fire Shut Up in My Bones, in which he recently starred at the Met; but he was certainly a revelation to me. The voice is beautiful, the delivery intense and well-acted. But even beyond that, this wonderful African-American singer has something much rarer: the kind of charismatic quality that can take over a whole performance space and command your undying allegiance. Needless to say, I am now a fan.

The other unexpected benefits were the pieces by Spanish composers I had never even heard of, much less heard. Joaquín Turina (1882–1949) was represented by a delightful quartet for piano, violin, viola, and cello. Gaspar Cassadó (1897–1966) gave us a masterful, original trio for piano, violin, and cello that ranged through a variety of eccentric modes, borrowing on the way from both modernism and folk.

And Pablo de Sarasate (1844–1908) was responsible for the intense, at times hilarious Navarra for Two Violins and Piano. De Sarasate must have been someone in his day, because there is a Whistler portrait of him (“Arrangement in Black”) that was painted in 1884, when he was forty; but it seems he is rarely played now, at least in this country. McDermott excelled herself in this piano performance, and the two violinists who played with her—Paul Huang and Danbi Um—kept up a remarkable interaction that contained (among other things) light playfulness, speedy virtuosity, seductive flirtation, and shy charm.

All three of these composers were discoveries for me, and their pieces vastly outweighed the Boccherini, Ravel, and Shostakovich that I had come to Alice Tully to hear. So isn’t that an accomplishment worth celebrating? And aren’t we glad CMS is brave and generous enough to persist in this kind of range?