Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
Logo of The Middlebury Campus
Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Sophie Shao and Friends kick off Performing Arts Series

World-renowned cellist Sophie Shao and her sextet performed at the Mahaney Arts Center’s Robison Hall last Saturday evening, Sept. 21. The concert, “Sophie Shao and Friends,” featured works by Arnold Schoenberg, Orlando Gibbons and Johannes Brahms. “Sophie Shao and Friends” also marked the first concert in the centennial of the Middlebury Performing Arts Series.

The evening began with three small pieces by 17th century English composer Orlando Gibbons. “Fantasia a 6, no. III” kicked things off. Shao and cellist Fred Sherry grounded the sextet’s tempo, using a call and response scheme that allowed violinists Jennifer Frautschi and Zachary DePue to let their instruments sing. The two other Gibbons pieces, “Fantasia a 6 no. IV” and the song ​“Go From My Window,” featured more from violists Che-Yen Chen and Paul Neubauer. In ​“Go From My Window,” ​the sextet’s violists acted as a firm harmony to the showier violins and cellos.

“I still hear different things in the Gibbons,” Chen said. “There’s a simplicity to his pieces.”

These musical vignettes shined in their simplicity, but they also highlighted Gibbons’s veddy​ ​British pith. Each cello riff conveyed no more or less than Gibbons’s gist, and the dynamics remained crisp, somewhere between ​piano ​and ​mezzo forte.

sophie-shao-475x316
MAX PADILLA/THE MIDDLEBURY CAMPUS
Sophie Shao brings together an ensemble of six talented friends.


“Some might call Gibbons the English Palestrina,” Shao said. Gibbons might write like the Italian Renaissance composer Palestrina, but Shao’s group played Gibbons with earnestness, as if they were playing Scarlatti. Their interpretation had swagger.

The program moved on to “Transfigured Night” b​y Arnold Schoenberg, a 20th century Austrian-American composer. If you know your classical music, you know that Schoenberg is a hot-button issue. In ​“Debussy: A Painter In Sound,” ​musicologist Stephen Walsh writes, “Schoenberg may be the first ‘great composer’ in modern history whose music has not entered the repertoire almost a century and a half after his birth.” Poor Arnold.

I asked Shao about Schoenberg’s trickiness for listeners. “[The music critic] Donald Tovey said something like, ‘It’s not a matter of whether you like Schoenberg’s music or not. It’s great no matter what.’” ​

At “Sophie Shao and Friends,” the beauty of “Transfigured Night” b​rought some audience members to tears. 

“Transfigured Night​” started with a two-note whisper from the cellists, followed by the same motif from the violas and violins. Robison Hall felt sad and lonely for a few minutes. Then suddenly, the strings went in dissonant directions — the cellos sung gaily; the violins whined ambivalently. Shao’s ensemble hurled arpeggios left and right, descending the audience into the chaotic middle section of the piece.

“It’s a psychological portrait,” Shao said, referring to the Richard Dehmel poem that Schoenberg based ​“Transfigured Night” ​on​.​ The poem deals with a conversation: a woman tells the man she loves that she got impregnated by someone else. The man takes this news rather well and says that he will raise the woman’s child anyway, attributing his forgiveness to the mystique of the night sky.

Such a cerebral work requires transparency, Shao argued. When I asked her what she meant, she said, “[Transparency is] allowing the melody to play so quietly that you shiver.”

The conclusion of ​“Transfigured Night​” suggested less atonal glum than it did the calm euphoria of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s ​“The Lark Ascending.” ​Despite a murky beginning in D-minor, Shao’s sextet allowed the closing measures to sing a bittersweet farewell.

“The piece invokes a dream,” violinist Jennifer Frautschi declared, adding that “Transfigured Night” offers a more accessible take on the infamously atonal composer. “[The piece] acts as a great introduction to Schoenberg.”

During the first two pieces, I was struck by how the sextet moved together. When cellist Fred Sherry cocked an eyebrow, the violins burst into ​pizzicato​; a nod from Shao yielded a key change. “I think you learn what helps and what doesn’t help,” Shao said when asked about the group’s signals. The six musicians worked together like clockwork.

[pullquote speaker="Sophie Shao" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]Music can be like a complex sudoku.[/pullquote]

For lovers of the ​avant-garde,​ the Schoenberg piece provided the most enjoyable part of the evening. But “Sophie Shao and Friends” ended with a seminal piece of classical music: Brahm’s “String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat Major.” 

In “​What To Listen For In Music,” Aaron ​Copland characterizes Brahms as a musical conservative, a reactionary who fought for “a lost cause” when he rejected the chromaticism of Wagner and pyrotechnics of Liszt. Brahms comes off as an old-fashioned guy.

Sometimes, however, the old ways really are the best. The Brahms sextet dominated the night.

The first movement of the Brahms struck home with its melody. It was refreshing to have a consistent theme after the tonal skulduggery of ​“Transfigured Night.” The audience never got lost in a jungle of notes; Shao patiently led us through the music.

“Sophie Shao and Friends” absolutely killed the ​“Andante ma moderato,” ​the second movement of the sextet. The ​Andante ​drummed out a slow, haunting chant in D-minor. One heard the folksy motifs that Brahms later capitalized on in his “Hungarian Dances.”

The last two movements of the sextet charmed the audience with unabashed Romanticism. The cellists especially owned the ​rondo ​movement, holding their own with lightning-quick ostinatos that zoomed to the piece’s end. After the last chord of “Sophie Shao and Friends,” the audience roared in approval.

After the concert, I joined the musicians for a late dinner at Two Brothers Tavern. Over onion rings, Shao told me about the grueling effort it took to pull off “Sophie Shao and Friends.”

“There were long days,” Shao admitted. “Music can be like a complex sudoku.”

I responded by quoting my favorite Sergei Rachmainoff proverb: “Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.”

The cellist nodded, smiling.


Comments



Popular