Matthew Murphy Photo
Composer Valerie Coleman.
An oboe and a bass, traveling the American landscape. A brass band inverting and celebrating the musical language of the street. Two pianists sweating side by side. On Wednesday afternoon, all this and more was part of the latest installment — and last of the year — in the Yale School of Music’s Lunchtime Chamber Music series, in which students at Yale’s conservatory give far-ranging programs of classical music past and present at Morse Hall, inside Sprague Hall at 470 College St.
Sprague Hall, which contains Morse Hall.
The concert started with the first movement of Franz Schubert’s famous “Trout” quintet (Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667), performed by Chaewon Kim on violin, Cassie Drake on viola, Ga Eun Lee on cello, Min Kyung Cho on bass, and Po Han Chiu on piano. The musicians were attuned to the balance among the instruments right from the piece’s opening flourish, handing the tradeoffs in melody between the violin and piano, ramping up the passages in which all instruments had an equal, energetic voice, and being careful with the movement’s more serene moments.
The Schubert was a fitting opening for the rest of the program. The “Trout” is firmly in the classical music canon, but it’s notable for its unusual instrumentation, the preponderance of lower-pitched stringed instruments that gives the entire piece a darker sound. It was a great signal for the eclecticism to come.
Nickolas Hamblin on clarinet, Amanda Chi on cello, and Ryan Sheng on piano followed with two movements from Johannes Brahms’ Clarinet Trio in A minor, Op. 114. Hamblin and Chi had great musical communication, matching phrasing to pick up and display the conversational nature of the score, and making space for Sheng to enter the discussion. Together all three emphasized the elements that made the piece most interesting, from its moments of surprise and frenetic activity to moments when the music seemed first to hesitate, then to rush forward, brimming with ideas. Brahms, again, is a stalwart of the classical canon, but it was refreshing to hear a more obscure work of his performed.
Next up were Maren Tonini on oboes and Hector Ponce on bass, playing three movements from Valerie Coleman’s American Vein, a piece from 2019. Tonini and Ponce both wore bandannas on their heads like sweatbands, a visual signal of the mood shift coming. Each of the three movements started with a few spoken lines, some written by Coleman about connection to nature (“Do you know about the World Tree / from which all others are born?”), another quoting Emma Lazarus (“a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame / is the imprisoned lightning, and her name / Mother of Exiles”), and another by Coleman about a gathering (“then came the bourbon and bluegrass”). Each of the pieces also found Coleman the composer deploying, playing with, and commenting on the general American compositional voice as popularized by Aaron Copland, the one that draws from American folk music, using open harmonic structures and pentatonic melodies in a way that so often connotes wide open spaces and a sense of nostalgia for a rural past.
Coleman’s music kept the wide open spaces but ditched the nostalgia, a feature Tonini and Ponce ably drew out of the score. They followed as the score set the tone and then complicated it with denser, more ambiguous harmonies and more aggressive textures. The first movement conveyed a sense of uneasy grandeur; it was a pretty place, but something was wrong. The next movement was more dramatic, the oboe pitched higher, the two instruments engaged in sweeping calls from the oboe answered by chantlike rhythms from the bass. It ended on a question. The final movement partook almost entirely of the musical language of bluegrass, but putting it on the oboe gave it a new twist, and both musicians dug into the idiosyncratic parts of the score that made it as much a wry look as a celebration of the genre.
Composer Michael Tilson Thomas.
Next, Karlee Navarro and Grace O’Connell on trumpet, Oved Rico on horn, Yuki Mori on trombone, and Alex Friedman on tuba tackled Michael Tilson Thomas’s 1988 piece “Street Song,” a riveting piece of music in which each instrument switched vigorously between long sustained drones and acrobatic passages that gave the piece a constant sense of urgency against an expansive backdrop. It was a piece full of keening dissonances and fleeting resolutions, with a particularly textured middle section of interlocking lines and buzzy shrillness. The musicians excelled at both blending into one another and diverging when needed, bringing out the piece’s big emotions, culminating in a sense of bruised victory.
Last on the program were Feiyi Liao and Hanyang Wang on pianos, their instruments placed side by side on the stage, to perform Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn, Op. 56b. The theme itself — the Chorale St. Antoni — was a simple grand hymn, that, over eight short movements, Brahms quickly put through its paces, tearing the original apart until there was little left of it, indulging flights of fancy, and following whether his own invention led. This put both pianists through their paces, as the stately pace of the original chorale gave way to rich, complex passages, sweeping cascades of notes, dramatic, almost military statements, and more than a few musical jokes. The pianists bent to their tasks, occasionally exchanging glances just to check in.
Near the end, Brahms returned to the original theme, at last, but by then it had all been confidently transformed. It was a satisfying reminder about how invention is itself part of the tradition. We’re given to thinking of the canon as a static thing, and as our contemporary composers as having to respond to it in some way, perhaps by working within it, or abandoning it, or bending its rules in ways that suit their own expressive needs. But that dynamic has in some sense always been with us. In the 19th century, Brahms saw fit to reinvent his 18th century musical antecedent, just as Coleman saw fit to reinvent Copland. New voices take from the past to make something that speaks to their present, and in the process, old voices can become new again.
The next Lunchtime Chamber Music concert is on Feb. 7. Admission is free. For more information about this and other concert offerings through the Yale School of Music, visit the school’s website.
