Second Movement Makes Music Visual

In a quiet, white-walled gallery somewhere that is not quite of this world or the next hang three paintings in a neat row, the canvases still smelling of fresh paint and stretched taut over their wood frames. The first, most graceful of ink wash paintings, emits folksy and sweeping Hungarian melodies just a hair away from Zoltán Kodály. Viewers may find themselves in a pentatonic trance. The second, a dark, deep watercolor still slightly wet on the page, hums of Béla Bartók, its colors just a moment away from explosion. The third, a opaque gouache that blends slightly into the background, sings of Maurice Ravel, and a time — or rather, artistic method — caught between old and new, the joy of the present and threat of the future.

For many contemporary musicians, such a task might be daunting. But for Mélanie Clapiès, who composed Trois Tableaux 1900 (Three Paintings 1900) for violin and cello last year, it was an overdue challenge to which she was eager to rise. With cellist Yan Levionnois, Clapiès forms the duo Les Pierrots Lunaires, the latest group to perform as part of the Second Movement Concert Series.

In their concert this past Friday night at Artspace, the two, who met at the Paris Conservatory in 2009, played for almost two hours, filling the empty exhibition space with deep, round sound. 

“These were composed last year, and this is actually the perfect place to play them … each is supposed to describe different materials. I hope you understand through listening,” said Clapiès before playing the pieces.

“People ask me if I play any of my own music, and to me I think ​‘of course I don’t play any of my own music! That’s not what I do.’ But Mélanie actually does perform her own music, and I’m really excited for us to get into it,” said Isabella Mensz, co-director of the series and a violist herself.

Trois Tableaux 1900 captured, with grace and precision, the frenetic and often grief-stricken spirit of much of early twentieth-century music. Or perhaps more movingly, the rocky beginnings of the century itself. Take a listen above to the second movement of Trois Tableaux, an homage to Bartók intended to map and mirror the movements of a watercolor painter. The exactitude and hauntedness of the piece are staggering: to Clapiès violin, her delicate bow sometimes caught in a near-violent seesaw on the strings, Levionnois adds what starts as a dissonant whisper and evolves into a muted, frantic cry, a watercolor that has dark colors blooming and bleeding across the page.

The rest of the duo’s set, including pieces like Erwin Schulhoff’s Duo for Violin and Cello and Maurice Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello, showed off Clapiès’ and Levionnois’ sources of inspiration and her greatest teachers. The Schulhoff captured a constant undertone of anxiety and trauma in staccato, raindrop-fast call and response sequences that undermined a pastoral refrain; the Ravel’s mourned something the composer hasn’t quite lost yet. Both, in the end, were voluptuous and inescapable, things you could not and did not want to turn away from, as they filled every nook and crevice in the room. 

Which in turn, reflects something of the Series’ humble beginnings over the past several months. What began as an attempt to ​“create a concert platform in which musicians are deeply engaged with their communities as teachers and mentors” has grown into international territory: Les Pierrots Lunaires are from France, and spent the afternoon coaching the Centennial Quartet, a group of four students from Neighborhood Music School (Matthew Shorten and Jake Houston, violin; Duncan Tam, viola; Henry Robinson, cello).

Their goal? To make sure that the quartet’s rendition of Alexander Borodin’s String Quartet no. 2 in D Major told a story too. A New Haven story, to be exact. According to series founder and co-director David Perry, it was a good one.

“The vision for this was a larger, sort of whole arts and music community in New Haven that is very integrated in the sense that … it gives this wonderful visual of a larger continuum of music, and I think it creates a really wonderful community for all of us.”

To learn more about the Second Movement Series, visit their website.