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Astral's "Zlabys and Friends'
Tom Purdom
Oh, to be young and composing
TOM PURDOM
Astral Artistic Services isn’t a contemporary music organization, but its “Andrius Zlabys and Friends” concert featured three pieces by composers who only had one date listed in the lifespan information traditionally placed after a composer’s name. Two of the new entries were world premieres commissioned by Astral. All were worth hearing, and the last one brought the afternoon to a stunning close.
The composers were all Curtis alumni, so the “friends” in the title included the creators of the music as well as the performers. Dmitri Levkovich (born 1979) is such a close personal friend of Zlabys that the pianist actually observed the composition of the piano trio that got the afternoon off to a moving start.
Levkovich’s trio contains only two movements instead of the customary three, but the omission of the first movement meant the musicians could jump right into the heartfelt melodies and big emotional surges of Levkovich’s slow movement. His concluding scherzo is a fugue built around a catchy short theme, played at a good clip, with most of the action taking place in the darker registers of all three instruments.
Something lighter from Prado
Luis Prado (born 1970) scored a big success two seasons ago when the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia premiered the Concerto for the Left Hand Alone that he wrote for Gary Graffman. Prado posted another hit last season with a setting of two intensely emotional contemporary poems premiered by Orchestra 2001. For his Astral commission, Prado chose something lighter: a dance suite for piano and string quartet based on old Spanish dances.
After a somewhat awkward opening labeled “Processional,” Prado’s quintet launches into five Spanish dances, with a finale built around a light, tango-ish item called the tanguillo. In between dances three and four, Prado threw in a playful touch: an intermezzo that combines serious piano pronouncements with squeaky little replies from the strings. The dance themes are all developed with inventive orchestration, riffs from the piano and all the technical and artistic tricks that composers have applied to dances since the Baroque masters turned the dance suite into a standard art music genre.
A long, stupendous climax
I had come to hear the Prado, but the big event turned out to be the finale: a quartet for piano and string trio by Yevgeniy Sharlat (born 1977). In his introductory remarks, Zlabys called the quartet “a piano concerto with strings,” and he certainly looked like he was working just as hard as any pianist who has ever tackled one of the Himalayas of the concerto literature.
The center of Sharlat’s quartet is a five-part section that involves the piano in a group of duets and trios interspersed with two serenades. The two outer sections both bear labels that allude to Bach— toccata for the opener, chorale for the finish. The toccata casts the pianist in a solo role that fully justified Zlabys’s comparison with a full-blown orchestral concerto. The chorale ended the afternoon with a long, stupendous climax, with Zlabys pounding big bell-like tolls out of the piano while the three string players worked away in front of him. The chorale didn’t sound like anything Bach himself might have written, but you could hear his complex, celebratory spirit ringing in every bar.
Mahler in his teens
The fourth item on the program was the first— and only— movement of a piano quartet that Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) wrote when he was 16. It’s the only Mahler chamber work musicians ever schedule, and they don’t do it very often. I’m certain I’ve heard it once or twice before, in the course of my critical rambles, but I can’t remember being particularly impressed. In the hands of Zlabys and his three partners, it acquired a weight and poignancy that upgraded it to a permanent location in my personal memory files. Mahler left a bare manuscript, according to Zlabys, with no tempo or phrasing markings, so the power packed into this performance has to be credited to the interpretative insight of the performers. Perhaps it helps to be young.
TOM PURDOM
Astral Artistic Services isn’t a contemporary music organization, but its “Andrius Zlabys and Friends” concert featured three pieces by composers who only had one date listed in the lifespan information traditionally placed after a composer’s name. Two of the new entries were world premieres commissioned by Astral. All were worth hearing, and the last one brought the afternoon to a stunning close.
The composers were all Curtis alumni, so the “friends” in the title included the creators of the music as well as the performers. Dmitri Levkovich (born 1979) is such a close personal friend of Zlabys that the pianist actually observed the composition of the piano trio that got the afternoon off to a moving start.
Levkovich’s trio contains only two movements instead of the customary three, but the omission of the first movement meant the musicians could jump right into the heartfelt melodies and big emotional surges of Levkovich’s slow movement. His concluding scherzo is a fugue built around a catchy short theme, played at a good clip, with most of the action taking place in the darker registers of all three instruments.
Something lighter from Prado
Luis Prado (born 1970) scored a big success two seasons ago when the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia premiered the Concerto for the Left Hand Alone that he wrote for Gary Graffman. Prado posted another hit last season with a setting of two intensely emotional contemporary poems premiered by Orchestra 2001. For his Astral commission, Prado chose something lighter: a dance suite for piano and string quartet based on old Spanish dances.
After a somewhat awkward opening labeled “Processional,” Prado’s quintet launches into five Spanish dances, with a finale built around a light, tango-ish item called the tanguillo. In between dances three and four, Prado threw in a playful touch: an intermezzo that combines serious piano pronouncements with squeaky little replies from the strings. The dance themes are all developed with inventive orchestration, riffs from the piano and all the technical and artistic tricks that composers have applied to dances since the Baroque masters turned the dance suite into a standard art music genre.
A long, stupendous climax
I had come to hear the Prado, but the big event turned out to be the finale: a quartet for piano and string trio by Yevgeniy Sharlat (born 1977). In his introductory remarks, Zlabys called the quartet “a piano concerto with strings,” and he certainly looked like he was working just as hard as any pianist who has ever tackled one of the Himalayas of the concerto literature.
The center of Sharlat’s quartet is a five-part section that involves the piano in a group of duets and trios interspersed with two serenades. The two outer sections both bear labels that allude to Bach— toccata for the opener, chorale for the finish. The toccata casts the pianist in a solo role that fully justified Zlabys’s comparison with a full-blown orchestral concerto. The chorale ended the afternoon with a long, stupendous climax, with Zlabys pounding big bell-like tolls out of the piano while the three string players worked away in front of him. The chorale didn’t sound like anything Bach himself might have written, but you could hear his complex, celebratory spirit ringing in every bar.
Mahler in his teens
The fourth item on the program was the first— and only— movement of a piano quartet that Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) wrote when he was 16. It’s the only Mahler chamber work musicians ever schedule, and they don’t do it very often. I’m certain I’ve heard it once or twice before, in the course of my critical rambles, but I can’t remember being particularly impressed. In the hands of Zlabys and his three partners, it acquired a weight and poignancy that upgraded it to a permanent location in my personal memory files. Mahler left a bare manuscript, according to Zlabys, with no tempo or phrasing markings, so the power packed into this performance has to be credited to the interpretative insight of the performers. Perhaps it helps to be young.
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