Above: violist Matthew Lipman and pianist Henry Kramer
~ Author: Ben Weaver
Thursday November 29th, 2018 - Violist Matthew Lipman’s recital at the Rose Studio at Juilliard was a lovely antidote to the chilly late November weather. It was my first time hearing a concert in this small venue: and as I listened to Lipman and pianist Henry Kramer make beautiful music together, in front of many of their Juilliard friends, it occurred to me that this is exactly how chamber music is supposed to be heard - in a small room, surrounded by friends. It is certainly how most of the chamber music we hear today was written: to be heard in drawing rooms, in the company of friends.
Matthew Lipman presented a carefully chosen program - which Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s co-director Wu Han made clear before the performance was chosen by Lipman, with no input from her.
A long, yearning melody opens Robert Schumann’s Märchenbilder, Op. 113, a gorgeous four-movement “sonata” composed in 1851, in what would become his final burst of creativity before his fragile mental health led to a suicide attempt and then confinement to a mental hospital. Dramatic and intense inner movements and ravishing, Romantic outer movements - with the long-spun melodies that are Schumann at his very best - make this work one of Schumann’s finest chamber compositions. 3 selections from Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet and Franz Waxman’s Carmen Fantasie (after Bizet) are filled with some of the most famous melodies in all of Western art music repertoire, and the two musicians made them sound fresh and exciting.
Ernest Bloch’s Suite hébraïque, composed in 1951, was receiving its CMS premiere of the complete work and it could not have been in better hands. Henry Kramer’s somber piano opens the work, the viola enters later with a plaintive chant. Much of Bloch’s music was composed to elevate his Jewish heritage. Though the melodies in his works are not necessarily traditional Hebrew melodies, often they do resemble them, in the same way composers like Dvořák and Tchaikovsky wrote melodies to resemble folk tunes of their native lands. And English composer York Bowen’s 1918 Phantasy is in that same way an extremely English work: you can feel the wind and sun of the English country-side and hear the hymns ringing out of a village church. Bowen is a largely forgotten composer today (at least in the US), even though in 1904 Camille Saint-Saëns declared the then 20-year-old Bowen to be “the most remarkable of the young British composers.”
It should be noted that Prokofiev, Bloch, Waxman and Bowen’s works were all receiving their CMS premieres by Matthew Lipman and Henry Kramer. And the center-piece of their program was a world premiere of Clarice Assad’s Metamorfose for Viola and Piano, which Lipman commissioned as a tribute to his late mother. Piano solo opens the work, dark and mysterious. The viola enters trembling. The composition alternates Neo-Romantic, melodic sections with darker, more austere and experimental ones. In the program notes Ms. Assad discusses that her composition is “an homage to Matt and his mom, a musical portrait of two different people… the sweet and bittersweet moments; the final lingerings of pain…” These words, perhaps, are the only “program notes” one needs to understand this beautiful composition, clearly a very personal one for Lipman, who played it with deep feeling and grace.
Lipman and Henry Kramer’s musical partnership was nearly perfect all evening. Lipman’s gorgeous playing, the rich tones of his viola, the perfect control he has over dynamics, the joy he clearly always derives from playing (as observed in this concert and over the many times I have heard him play in Alice Tully Hall), make him one of the finest violists of his generation. Mr. Kramer’s beautiful, deeply felt playing on the Steinway was also a joy to hear. And the impact such committed performances make in a small space can not be overstated.
~ Ben Weaver