click to enlarge - Courtesy Of Jessie Glass
- Katherine Winterstein
Chamber music concerts seem eminently safe today, even an escape from whatever bad news one's phone brings up next. But in musically rich Austria and Prussia in the first half of the 1800s, chamber concerts — occurring then in the rooms (or chambres in French) of private homes — could lead to arrests.
Craftsbury Chamber Players' next concert recalls both the intimacy and the frisson of that era in a program of Franz Schubert and Fanny Mendelssohn this Wednesday, August 7, at Colchester's Elley-Long Music Center and Thursday, August 8, at Hardwick Town House. This is the group's fifth weekly program of six in its 58th summer season, led by music director and cellist Fran Rowell.
Pianists Marcantonio Barone and Inessa Zaretsky, who teach at conservatories in the Philadelphia area and New York City, respectively, will play Schubert's Fantasy in F Minor for piano four hands — that is, together on one piano. Violinist and Vermont Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Katherine Winterstein will join Zaretsky for Schubert's Sonatina in A Minor for violin and piano. And Barone will perform Mendelssohn's Trio in D Minor with Vermont violinist Mary Rowell, a new-music innovator and regular with Waterbury's TURNmusic; and cellist Mimi Hwang, who teaches at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y.
click to enlarge - Courtesy Of Jessie Glass
- Mary Rowell
Schubert and Mendelssohn were born only eight years apart but likely never met; they grew up in Vienna and Berlin, respectively, in widely different social circumstances. Schubert (1797-1828), the son of a schoolteacher and a former maid, lacked the social status to gain admittance to Vienna's music world and saw few public performances of his work during his brief lifetime. While teaching young children at his father's schools, he somehow managed to turn out some 900 compositions.
Friends who recognized his talent held private salon parties, featuring him performing his music on the piano, that became known as Schubertiades. But following the French Revolution, Austrian police, suspicious of any boisterous youthful gathering, broke up an 1820 Schubertiade, arresting Schubert (then 23) and four of his friends. One was thrown in jail without trial for more than a year and then banned from Vienna altogether. Schubert and the others got away with a strong reprimand for insulting the police.
Schubert's 1816 Sonatina ends with "a rondo full of energy and drive and a bit of [Romani] flair," Rowell writes in her typically entertaining program notes — in other words, the piece would seem perfect for a rowdy chamber performance. And it's easy to imagine the composer's Fantasy — a mesmerizing work in four movements played without pause — being performed for the first time by Schubert and composer-pianist Franz Lachner sitting side by side at a friend's home piano in May 1828. Schubert died six months after that premiere, at age 31, oblivious of the fact that his music would become a staple of the classical repertoire.
Mendelssohn (1805-1847) had the advantages of wealth and connections that Schubert lacked — but the disadvantage of being a woman. The firstborn of a prominent Berlin banker, she was an accomplished pianist and composer who served as her younger brother Felix's music adviser but was ultimately expected only to marry. Fortunately, her married life included leading the musicales, or salons, that her deceased mother had hosted at the family home, where she could perform her own music.
Mendelssohn composed nearly 500 pieces, including 125 for piano, despite knowing she could have no public career in music and dying at 41. Most of her work remained in manuscript form, though a few collections of short piano pieces, some songs and a piano trio were published during her lifetime. Rowell's notes add that Felix arranged for a handful of her songs to be published under his name "in what was considered an open secret."
Asked how the musicians would manage to communicate the intimacy of the concert's works in the lofty, open-plan space of Elley-Long, Rowell said, "The music does it. You can play these in a 3,000-seat hall, and people will lean forward to listen."