Great Barrington — When the skittering forest fairies of Felix Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” show up in the scherzo of his C-minor trio, you notice them right away. In fact, their arrival will be one of the highlights in a program of works by Felix Mendelssohn and Antonin Dvořák presented by Close Encounters with Music at Saint James Place on Saturday, February 18, at 6 p.m.
But those rascally sprites come at a high cost to performing musicians: Mendelssohn himself described the scherzo of his C-minor trio as “a trifle nasty to play.” But he wasn’t actually trying to torture anyone with it, because he had friends who were up to the task of performing it.
And so do we.
On the evening of February 18, we have Renana Gutman on piano, Xiao-Dong Wang on violin, and CEWM Artistic Director Yehuda Hanani on cello. These ever-reliable CEWM alumni are going to have their hands full with Mendelssohn’s scherzo and with many other technical challenges. (The entire piece requires fairly virtuosic playing from all members of the group.) Gutman, in particular, will be pushed to her technical limits (even Yuja Wang makes this piece look difficult), but you’ll see all three players really hustle on Saturday evening.
The program’s title, “Town & Country,” alludes to the two composers’ dissimilar domiciles—Mendelssohn’s Berlin and Dvořák’s home town of Nelahozeves, Bohemia. But the differences between the composers’ music are even greater (enormous, actually).
Robert Schumann (and many of his peers) considered Felix Mendelssohn “the Mozart of the nineteenth century … the most illuminating of musicians, who sees more clearly than others through the contradictions of our era and is the first to reconcile them.” And one of the chief contradictions that needed reconciling was the age-old struggle between tradition and innovation—in particular, between the musical values of the classic era, which emphasized form and structure, and the new ideals of such romantics as Dvořák, who threw aside conventions established before Beethoven’s time to unabashedly emphasize pathos, mystery, and individuality in his music.
And there is no better example of this than his “Dumky” trio, a collection of six individual Dumka movements drawing from native Czech folk music and presented in a way that is analogous to the traditional four-movement scheme. (A Dumka is a pensive slavic song that alternates between sharply contrasting moods.)
Dvořák’s trio is immediately engaging, easy to follow, and full of gorgeous melodies and harmonies, many of which bear an uncanny resemblance to modern pop music. No wonder the piece was a hit at its premiere. It was so popular the band immediately took it on a 40-city tour. It’s been one of the composer’s most popular works ever since.
Back in pre-COVID days, CEWM events were usually followed by a wine-and-cheese reception, where audience members could ask questions of the musicians and deliver personalized kudos. This benefited both listeners and players and was actually an important part of CEWM’s work. Now, for the first time since the start of COVID, the receptions are back, and all ticket holders are welcome.
Hear Felix Mendelssohn’s Trio No. 2 in C minor and Antonin Dvorak’s “Dumky” Trio at Saint James Place on Saturday, February 18, at 6 p.m. Tickets here.
