The Israeli Chamber Project.
The Israeli Chamber Project gave a generous and masterful concert Tuesday evening at Merkin Concert Hall. I’ve written about the group for Time Out New York and The Jewish Daily Forward, and I commend to one and all their début CD, Opus 1 (Azica). Their upcoming dates include two additional New York concerts, at Town Hall (February 9) and again at Merkin (May 28).
Vive la France !
Tuesday’s concert was very much sous le signe de la France, opening with Jacques Ibert’s 1944 Trio for Violin, Cello, and Harp. Cellist Michal Korman and violinist David McCarroll turned in supple, slithering, luminous playing in the first movement, a watery Allegro, while harpist Sivan Magen worked his usual magic in the Andante (its final note dusky and tinged with menace) and the Scherzando, which he cloaked in a thousand iridescent colors.
(Incidentally, Tuesday’s program and Magen’s playing on Nicholas Phan’s Britten CD Still Falls the Rain [Avie], which I reviewed for WQXR, make me long to hear him in the otherworldly final scene of Verdi’s Falstaff, when the harp at long last enters for Fenton’s sonetto, evoking Orpheus’s lyre, troubadour song, and enchantments that are achingly, piercingly ephemeral. Oh, well, a gal can dream!)
Mordechai Seter with Alexander Boskovich c. 1940.
Clarinetist Tibi Cziger described Mordechai Seter’s 1973 Trio for Piano, Clarinet, and Cello as an “anti-virtuosity political statement.” It is music deeply bound up with silence, perhaps not to the extreme degree that one encounters in Salvatore Sciarrino’s works, but bearing markings such as morendo, cristallino, and senza colore. At times, the notes emanating from the instruments seemed reduced to their rawest, most elemental state: Cziger’s clarinet sent forth whispery rushes of air, Korman’s cello almost toneless rubbing sounds, and Assaff Weisman’s piano desolate, chilly chords the color (or non-color) of unpolished onyx. The gluey, uncanny silences around which the playing sounded brought to mind Daniele Gatti’s inspired conducting of Wagner’s Parsifal at the Met last season. Seter, whom Cziger called “the founder of artistic classical music in Israel,” was born in Russia in 1916 and influenced by the French avant-garde; I for one would be grateful to hear the ICP in an all-Seter program, perhaps on a future CD.
Michal Korman.
McCarroll and Korman (who deserves a medal for stamina in addition to praise for her unfailingly inspired playing) returned for Ravel’s 1922 Sonata for Violin and Cello. Here, too, the sheer range of hues and musical effects summoned by the players astonished. In the first movement (from which Bernard Herrmann may have lifted a theme for his Vertigo score), the violin and cello perform an intricate dance, sometimes echoing each other, sometimes moving to and fro against each other. Korman and McCarroll bathed the music in the quiet radiance of a stained glass window glimpsed on an overcast morning. The smashing Très vif movement overflowed with sassy pizzicati, ill-bred trills, and “grungy,” bluesy playing, all of which should be taken as high praise; the Lent section opened with a gently rocking figure that gradually turned uneasy, and ended in a soft sigh into nothingness. The final movement, in which Korman shifted seamlessly between tender, elegant playing and dense, rubbery sounds, built to a confident, exhilarating conclusion.
Philippe Hersant.
Korman and Magen returned after intermission for Philippe Hersant’s 2004 Choral for Cello and Harp, which opens with a fog of harp overtones. Like Seter’s Trio, Hersant’s music seems to gaze longingly at soundlessness, and it toys with sonic extremes, with the harp sometimes sending forth tinny and metallic pin-pricks while at other times weaving a sweet, pastel backdrop for the cello’s gravitas. At the work’s conclusion, the two instruments play together, the cello in its highest, most hissy register.
The program’s final offering, Béla Bartók’s Contrasts, is on the ICP’s Opus 1 recording (with Itamar Zorman taking the violin part). A divine musician, Cziger summoned Pied-Piper brilliance and seductiveness as well as a sense of cool, oblique mystery in this music written for and commissioned by Benny Goodman. Weisman played with quiet authority in the Piheno movement, and the raucous virtuosity of all three musicians in the finale drew whoops and roars of approval from the audience.
☛ Visit the Israeli Chamber Project’s website to join their mailing list and learn more about their concerts in the States and overseas. Learn about the wide variety of upcoming events at Merkin Concert Hall and in the People’s Symphony Concerts series.
