My review, from the March 2 Lancaster New Era …
Classical musicians, like many other musicians, like to get out from under the umbrella of larger groups and take the spotlight in smaller ensembles.
The Lancaster Symphony Orchestra’s new chamber music series put violinist Igor Yuzefovich, the orchestra’s concertmaster, pianist Michael Sheppard and cellist Dariusz Skoraczewski in that spotlight Sunday night at Franklin & Marshall College’s Roschel Center for some outstanding music-making.
The three, performing as the Monument Trio, started the concert with Franz Joseph Haydn’s Piano Trio in G Major, “Gypsy Rondo.” The work was light-hearted but not inconsequential, especially in the final movement when the contrast between the major-key, rhythmically-steady sections and the minor-key “Gypsy” sections were played up for all they were worth.
Next came Johannes Brahms’ Piano Trio in C Major, opening up a whole new world of complexity and seriousness. All four movements of the work revolve around the same four notes, appearing in endless permutations and moods.
There were times when the work seemed to flirt with abstraction, others when warm-spirited romanticism took hold.
“It’s all about inviting the audience into our world — the performers’ world,” Yuzefovich told the audience during his introduction to the piece, and that’s what the performance that followed did.
The performers’ world can sometimes be a frightening one. Who needs a horror movie when you’ve got the Trio No. 2 in E Minor by Dmitri Shostakovich? This work got a searing, terrifying performance from beginning to end. The work evoked tolling bells from the piano, with scraped and dessicated strings playing dances for the dead, sometimes evoking mania or the furious buzzing of hornets.
The finale’s Jewish theme, a dance melody that degenerates into pounding obsession and then into exhaustion, evokes the blackest of black humor. Appropriately, the stunned audience took a few moments before applauding the amazing performance.
Astor Piazzolla’s “Primavera Portena,” the “Spring” section of his “Four Seasons of Buenos Aires,” was no lightweight finale. The players could let go and let the subtle rhythms swing, but the smoky, dense atmosphere evoked by Piazzolla’s complex harmonies seemed to convey a sense of melancholy. In the trio’s gentle performance, it became the positive to the Shostakovich negative, a dance of the life that continues despite damage and loss.
The series will continue March 22 and May 17.
