Had you stumbled into the Neurosciences Institute on Saturday evening and wondered who was presenting the concert, the striking black music staff rising behind the Steinway onstage would have given you a potent clue. Musical notation, boldly standing out against the white auditorium walls, spelled out the opening four measures of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, suggesting the most likely presenter would be Mainly Mozart.

Mainly Mozart Spotlight Series 2010

^{Courtesy photo}

These four bars of music are extremely well-known—even if you’re a classical music neophyte, you’d recognize the melody. However, the musicians who took the stage, and much of the music they performed, were unfamiliar, even to local chamber music concert veterans.

Pianist Reiko Uchida, violinist Frank Huang and cellist Thomas Kraines have never played in San Diego before (not counting a small soiree Uchida appeared at last year for Mainly Mozart donors). All three musicians are testaments to the prodigal American system of musical training. Our conservatories and universities churn out hundreds of high-caliber performers every year, yet only a few are fortunate enough to make a living at it. Fifty years ago, the level of playing exhibited by these 20-somethings would have been cause for critical excitement, but these days, it’s just something to be expected, due no doubt to the fierce competition for a limited amount of work.

All three players displayed what could be called modern performance standards—impeccable technique, clear sound, spot-on intonation (for Huang and Kraines) and beauty of tone, with a healthy respect for different types of tone production and emotional projection depending on the musical era (in contrast to the early and mid-20th century schools of performance where players inserted a large amount of their own personalities into the score, sometimes at the composer’s expense). Their sounds were carefully shaped, always controlled; in particular, Kraines’s staccato bowing produced an impressively gorgeous tone, completely in character with his material.

One wished, however, that these outstanding young musicians had some outstanding compositions to play, but the first half of the program was devoted to lesser efforts (and in the case of Turina, a lesser composer).

Mozart’s piano trios are among his less memorable compositions, but if you play for Mainly Mozart, you have to program something by Wolfgang Amadeus. Huang and Uchida opted for a violin sonata, and while Mozart produced some notable music in that genre, the Violin Sonata no. 20 in C, K. 303 does not belong to this category. It is competent, charming, and provides the violinist with more to do than play accompanying figures to the piano (Mozart’s first 16 violin sonatas, written in his childhood, were titled sonatas for piano with violin accompaniment). However, given the superior quality of Mozart’s later violin sonatas, the choice of K. 303 was frustrating.

Huang and Uchida played cleanly and captured the emotional shifts between the alternations of slow and fast music of the first movement. In his late symphonies, Mozart invested minuet form with a grandeur and emotional heft lacking in other Classical-era composers (except for Haydn), but in this sonata, the 22-year-old composer treated the minuet as little more than a glittery bauble; Huang and Uchida buffed it up and made it sparkle.

A “fantasie” for piano trio by Joaquin Turina, Circulo, was promised in the printed program, but Uchida, Huang, and Kraines substituted Turina’s second Piano Trio, op. 76, composed in 1933. The merits of this trio, if any, lie in its use of Spanish folk and popular music, but this music is so thoroughly dressed up in late 19th-century French academic garb that its earthy vigor and sensuality is completely suppressed. Falla, Granados, and Albeniz all found ways to translate the passion and mystery of their national music into classical forms and genres; occasionally Turina did himself, but in his second Piano Trio, the use of folk music is polite, refined, and thoroughly boring. Folk and popular music transformed classical music in the early 20th century through composers such as Ives, Bartok, Janacek, Stravinsky, Poulenc, Villa-Lobos, Milhaud, Debussy, Ravel and Gershwin, making Turina’s genteel construction, which followed in the wake of these masters, all the more disappointing.

Uchida had the opportunity here to play more sonorously; her open fifths and octaves projected firmly without harshness, and the quiet impressionistic passages were rendered with coy delicacy. Huang and Kraines gave this work their best effort, yet no amount of mystery and ebullience could inflate this punctured balloon of a composition. In prefatory remarks to the Turina trio, Uchida confessed that a time signature of five beats to the bar was unusual for them, to which one could respond that this is 2010, not 1910, and these talented musicians need to expand their repertoire.

The piano trios of Beethoven, like much of his other instrumental music, stand as culminating statements in that medium for the 18th century, and as formidable creations to be reckoned with throughout the 19th. The Piano Trio no. 11, op. 121a, however, is not the multimovement work one might expect for the genre, but rather a theme and variations on a banal Singspiel tune by a now forgotten composer (Wenzel Müller). Compared to Beethoven’s other piano trios, some of which can be considered the finest ever written, the “Kakadu” Trio is lightweight. Yet compared with the uninspired trio by Turina and Mozart’s trifle of a violin sonata, it stood out as the most profound statement heard so far that evening.

Thomas Kraines’s comments on Beethoven’s variation technique were so insightful they bear repeating here. Some composers (like Brahms) take a beautiful melody and construct elaborations on that. Beethoven, however, took incredibly simple tunes, mundane little ditties like Diabelli’s waltz theme or Muller’s “Ich bin der Schneider Kakadu” (or even his own melodies—think of the theme to the last movement of the Eroica Symphony, and look what Beethoven does with it) and created magnificent pieces from such ordinary materials. Kraines compared this to Laurence Olivier’s later roles in film, such as the Nazi dentist in Marathon Man. The creative challenge is to see what life one can breathe into something that many considered beneath his talents.

The opening to Beethoven’s trio is one of the great build-ups in chamber music: a serious, almost tragic, slow movement in a minor key eventually sets the listener up for a stupid little C major piano melody with simple chords in the left hand—it almost sounds like a children’s piece. Imagine the portentous opening of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony giving way finally to a simply scored version of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," and you might get some idea of the hilarious switcheroo Beethoven pulls on the listener. The ensuing variations in the trio are musical proof that a genius may take a sow’s ear and artfully construct a Louis Vuitton handbag. The drama of the opening and the congeniality of the variations were wonderfully rendered by Uchida, Huang, and Kraines.

After intermission, the three musicians devoted the entire second half to Smetana’s Piano Trio in G minor. Finally these performers had a vehicle to fully demonstrate their interpretive skills, and they took full advantage of it. Their playing was dramatic without being hysterical, full of emotion and spirit, yet also capable of plain speaking, as in the dance-like second movement. For folks looking for more musical substance, it was here in spades, and the audience responded with a well-deserved standing ovation.

For a copy of the program, click here.