Being a classical music fan in the 21st century isn’t so much culturally rewarding as it is a ton of fun. The reasons are like four interconnected movements of a fine symphony: 1) The boundless richness and relevance of great works by great 17th- through 19th-century composers, and the whole world of their lesser-known works to explore; 2) The persistent, fascinating presence of atonal (or, to use Igor Stravinsky’s preferred version, “anti-tonal”) music—if you find it aesthetically unconvincing, are you clinging to the human predisposition to respond to melody and denying the brain a chance to evolve?; 3) The wealth of 20th-century composers who cherish tonality while finding ways to embellish it with cutting-edge dynamics; and 4) A fresh crop of contemporary composers to take stock of—how do they distinguish themselves under the weight of layers of tradition?
 Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival co-founder Timothy Summers raced through Arnold Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 in a tonally adventurous show on Sunday. |
Three of these reasons were on display last Sunday at UVA’s Old Cabell Hall in the third installment of this year’s Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival (and it would have been four except for the cancellation of a work by contemporary American composer Eric Moe).
Sitting side by side at one piano, Benjamin Hochman and Mimi Solomon offered up Franz Schubert’s Fantasie in F minor for Piano Duet. Solomon provided the emotional heft in the lower registers, while Hochman nimbly danced around in the upper registers, and in remarkable tandem they belted out the song-like passages that make the trips home to mournful F minor so meaningful.
Julia Gallego on flute, Matthew Hunt on clarinet, Solomon on piano, and Festival co-directors and co-founders Timothy Summers on violin and Raphael Bell on cello took on the atonalities in Arnold Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1. If this work is played with an almost romantic conviction, as these five certainly played it, you can hear Schoenberg’s early 20th-century urge to devise an alternate universe as a counterpoint to political and cultural nonsense dressed up as sense, which in the quietest moments brings to the eyes if not tears, then the ghost of tears.
Finally, violinist Jennifer Koh and Hochman brought to life the Grand Duo for Violin and Piano of American composer Lou Harrison, who died in 2003. The two performers brilliantly handled Harrison’s enchanting brand of tonality: economic yet lyrical, with a rhythmic and melodic concentration that doesn’t need harmony to be complete. Koh particularly shined in the third movement, a kind of Irish/Asian lullaby, and in the second and fourth movements Hochman wowed the audience with his use of a tool Harrison invented—resembling a thin scrub brush—that allows a pianist to evenly strike a cluster of octaves, like a child banging on a piano with his arm in a miraculously rational way.
Two more concerts remain in the Festival, on Thursday, September 18, and Sunday, September 21, each with equally wide-ranging programs.