The first half of Europe’s 19th century was an age of epochal social upheaval, of national borders continually reshaped one cannon blast and bayonet charge at a time. Beyond smoke-filled battlefields, another greater uprising with far more lasting consequences was taking place — in the humble work rooms of artists who took up arms with pen and brush. Camerata Pacifica recounted to its audience at the Huntington Library last Tuesday this “revolution in the head”, as Ian MacDonald once said of another, later musical agent of massive change.
As if overwhelmed by the noise of the world, much music of this period turned inward. Beethoven was among the pioneers of this shift; Schubert and Schumann soon followed.
Beethoven’s pair of Op. 49 piano sonatas, composed when he was not yet thirty, forecast mappings of the terra incognita of the subconscious that preoccupied later composers. Gilles Vonsattel, in prefatory remarks before his performance of the first Op. 49 sonata, noted its subversive weirdness. His searching performance, with finely calibrated voicing and rhetorical shading, left no doubt that it is more than what it appears to be at first hearing. This is tiny music that conceals explosive implications.
Gilles Vonsattel [Image:Camerata Pacifica]
These are more fully realized in the later Op. 90 piano sonata, one of the signposts that announce Beethoven’s late style. Vonsattel underlined the melancholy of its mercurial first movement; he integrated its sforzando chords and downward runs into its soundscape rather than emphasize their disruptive potential. His playing of the Schubertian second movement, on the other hand, flowed serenely, carried along by the pianist’s seemingly endless reserves of legato.
Schubert himself made an appearance in the program’s subsequent work. The arpeggione — think neglected love child of the cello and guitar — never did catch on, but its name lives on in Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata. Violist Che-Yen Chen, accompanied by Vonsattel, played an arrangement for viola; his performance was warm and unfussy. They observed the exposition repeat in the first movement, very welcome in this performance, and played the slow movement with subtly flexible phrasing, sweetened by Chen with discreet portamenti, that allowed Schubert’s melodies to glow.
Chen and Vonsattel ended their program with Schumann’s vignette-like Märchenbilder; their performance was lit up with gratifying interplay between the two musicians. Incipient madness may have begun to take a hold of Schumann by the time he composed the Märchenbilder, but Chen and Vonsattel saw that as no excuse to relax their controlled interpretation of this work.