Old Music Review

Just to get some of that up here, too. This is a from a good while ago......

I really enjoy going to chamber music. It gets better and better the more you go. Maybe its because it is always such a joy to actually hear the real instruments, hear real acoustics and not your speakers. Maybe it is because you know that it is a complete escape: you are guaranteed not to see anyone you know there, yet still have a great time. However, there is still something to be said for getting to hear some of the most dramatic, beautiful, and sometimes just your favorite tunes played by the best musicians.

There was no bitter pill to swallow with the Kalichstein, Laredo, and Robinson trio this evening. They put on an excellent concert featuring Beethoven and Shostakovitch, thats it. They opened with a Beethoven apparently composed for a young student of his, which I had never heard before, but it was wonderful.

They then played Shostakovitch Trio Op. 67. You should listen to it again. It is perhaps one of the most dramatic pieces written for piano trio. It is definitely one of my favs, and I have an excellent recording of the Trio Wanderer doing it. I did not realize that the opening of the andante is played such that the higher pitched notes are actually played as harmonics on the cello while the lower tones are just the lower register of the violin. It definitely explains the peculiar quality of the sound and eerie texture that you hear in that opening. Mr Kalichstein, the pianist, was kind enough to say a few words before they played this piece describing some aspects of the piece. He said that Shostakovitch was very aware of politics and the world around him, and this was often reflected in his music in subtle ways. This particular piece was apparently composed just after he learned of the Nazi concentration camps. I don't know if this is true, but it sure is a nice thing to say and a great motivation for the very heavy mood of the piece.

The one thing, however, is that they moved through the large, high gravity chords that begin the Largo (and allegretto) sections perhaps a little too quickly. They moved faster than the Trio Wanderer's recording, which I think doesn't do justice to the weight and foreboding nature of those chords.

They concluded with the Archduke trio by Beethoven, which was simply marvelous. The real talent of the KLR trio is in their ability to completely control the weight and texture of each note, and do it together. I remember one phrase in which the cello and the piano were so completely together, and that they were playing exactly the same tone and feel of staccato from their respective instruments. Beautiful.

However, I had the unfortunate luck to sit next to the biggest Boob in the audience. I thought that as you got older, your sense of etiquette and respect for others improved. Not so with this fellow. He was fidgitier than I was when I was 8. Every minute, he shifted his weight around, moved to scratch himself in such a way as to produce the most noise. And then his watch went "beep beep" three chords into the Largo section of the Shostakovitch. He even had the audacity to check his cell phone for messages during the first movement of the Beethoven. I almost smacked him. I can't believe that his wife sitting on the other side of him let him get away with it too.

Furthermore, it was the strangest professional concert setting I have ever been to. They played in some side theater at the Mountain View Performing Arts center which was really a theater space that they had brought risers and chairs into and covered the floor with tasteless black matting of the variety that you would normally find covering something like a basketball court when it is being used for some event other than basketball. Needless to say the venue was not acoustically excellent nor beautiful, it was surrounded by the typical black theater curtains. Can the city of Mountain View, home to Google, Microsoft, Intel, AMD, and many others I'm sure, not afford to build a first class performance venue?

As usual, I was by far the youngest person in the audience.