BODY AND SOUL

From the religious to the romantic, the phrase “body and soul” has long held a fount of implications. The eponymous 1930 song, with music by Johnny Green and lyrics by Edward Heyman, Robert Sour, and Frank Eyton, is a quintessential reflection of the aching challenges of love — one of the reasons it has been recorded by so many popular and jazz artists. Romantic ordeals haunt the characters in Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, including Tereza, who was “born of a situation which brutally reveals the irreconcilable duality of body and soul, that fundamental human experience.”

The works on the first program of this year’s ChamberFest Cleveland present three distinctive takes on human experience in the pure language of music. While there certainly are links between the plot of The Fairy Queen and the short pieces Henry Purcell lavished on this semi-opera, these miniatures have no need to mimic the action — just as ChamberFest’s programs don’t simulate specific content in Kundera’s book — to work their magic. Nor do they need words, which is also true of both Carl Frühling’s Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano and Dvořák’s Quartet No. 2 for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello, pieces that embrace regional influences and share a tendency to wear their hearts (souls?) on their respective Austrian and Czech sleeves.

Henry Purcell (1659-1695) was one of the great Baroque composers who embraced matters of the heart in his stage works as he rose to the pinnacle of his profession during his abbreviated life (a century later, Mozart would die at almost the same age). He dominated the field of British composers until the 20th century. Among Purcell’s many theatrical pieces was an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that premiered in 1692 as The Fairy Queen. None of the Bard’s text was used in what was deemed “a Restoration spectacular,” but the story inspired Purcell to create more than two hours of music, much of it performed during the masques for the principal characters, and so voluminous and varied that it can hardly be considered “incidental.” (Soon after the earliest performances, the score disappeared, only to resurface in the early 20th century.)

The score’s nearly 60 selections include dances, arias, duets, choruses, and instrumental numbers played by winds, trumpets, timpani, strings, and harpsichord. The music has been performed in countless versions for period and modern instruments alike. The sprightly and majestic excerpts on this ChamberFest program are drawn from the first, third, and fifth acts, whetting the appetite for more Purcellian treasures.

If a 17th-century British composer has been feted for centuries, the Austrian composer Carl Frühling remains known largely to pianists and champions of his orchestral, chamber, choral, and pieces for voice and piano. Frühling (18681937) was most admired as a teacher and collaborative pianist who teamed in recital with such eminent violinists as Bronisław Huberman and Pablo de Sarasate. He studied in Vienna during the late 1880s, which may explain his music’s resemblance to that of an epic figure of the period and the city — Johannes Brahms. Frühling’s art is in full blossom — appropriate: his surname means “spring” — in the so-called Clarinet Trio, Op. 40, which was published in 1925 but likely was composed several decades earlier.

Whatever its provenance, the work is rich and affecting, with sweeping melodic content and buoyant conversations among clarinet, cello, and piano. The opening movement is the most Brahmsian in its warm interplay and wealth of contrapuntal writing. In the playful second movement, Frühling employs the popular dance forms of the waltz and Ländler to keep the instruments in swirling and tender motion. The pensive slow movement finds musical lines transformed through subtle rhythmic and chromatic means, with hints of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde suggesting a source of motivation. Ebullient spirits dominate the finale, whose brief clouds are set aside by giddy surges of activity, the instruments often savoring the shared material. It is clear from this trio that more of Frühling’s music deserves to emerge from the shadows.

By contrast, Antonín Dvořák needs no introduction, since he is a frequent and cherished presence in concert halls and opera houses. But there is another good reason for including him on this program. He shares a homeland with Kundera, who mentions him in The Unbearable Lightness of Being when the painter Sabina ponders the nature of identity and wonders what binds Czechs together. Possibly the landscape, she muses. “Or the culture? But what was that? Music? Dvořák and Janáček? Yes. But what if a Czech had no feeling for music? Then the essence of being Czech vanished into thin air.”

Those of us who love music can hardly fathom how anyone of any nationality can’t have a feeling for it, and certainly where Dvořák is concerned. Like so many of his works, the Piano Quartet No. 2, Op. 87, is generous in emotion and fertile in compositional imagination. Dvořák wrote it in the summer of 1889, just before he composed the sunny Symphony No. 8, Op. 88. Both scores are characteristic of Dvořák, a master melodist and virtuoso of motivic development — the ability to take small kernels of material and massage them into different shapes and atmospheres.

This gift is immediately apparent in the opening bars of Op. 87 as the strings announce the robust first subject, which will undergo numerous transformations, and are soon joined by the piano. New ideas pop up or evolve from previous incarnations of the first subject as they move through major and minor keys and a spectrum of moods. It’s a euphoric ride typical of this most open-hearted of composers.

The cello announces the main theme in the touching slow movement. The piano answers in kind, and the other strings add subtle touches as the original material is expanded into dramatic and tranquil regions. “Grazioso” is Dvořák’s indication at the start of the third movement, a scherzo that couldn’t be more genial, even when it changes character midway to kick up its local heels with all sorts of dotted rhythms and arpeggiated piano flourishes. The invigorating finale is yet another example of Dvořák’s wizardly skill at seamlessly forging ideas into fresh guises. Everyone is on board to begin the movement, which abounds in folksy bravura and a kind of Dvořákian lyricism that this composer mustered to beguiling effect.

© Donald Rosenberg

friday 16 june 7:30pm