Novus NY Deliver an Auspicious Performance of New and 20th Century Classical Works

Back in the spring of 2017, there was a fantastic series of concerts of new classical music staged by Trinity Church at their smaller and older sister edifice, St. Paul’s Chapel a couple of blocks to the north. This blog covered several of those performances. Why would events from so far in the past be newsworthy now?

Considering that we lost three years of our lives in the time since, everything in the mirror seems closer than it is. But in keeping with what seems to be a very auspicious trend, there’s a similar and arguably even more ambitious festival going on at the chapel, with lunchtime shows continuing through May 4. At 1 PM, there’s jazz on Mondays, organ music on Tuesdays, Bach choral and instrumental works on Wednesdays and contemporary classical on Thursdays. This past Thursday, a subset of Novus NY treated a tiny audience to a diverse, sometimes spellbinding program that bodes well for what’s in store for the rest of the spring.

Flutist and ensemble leader Melissa Baker explained to the crowd that this year’s theme is empathy, something that the powers that be in this city did their best to crush beginning in March of 2020. It wasn’t clear how this was reflected in the music on the bill, which ranged from wary and harrowing to thoughtfully drifting.

The ensemble opened with the world premiere of Brad Balliett‘s Quintet For Piano and Winds. Gershwinesque swing with dissociative microtones from the lower reeds – the composer himself on bassoon, Benjamin Fingland on clarinet and Stuart Breczinski on oboe – quickly gave way to a tense muddle and then a rise from spacious floating motives to some jaunty pageantry where Baker and horn player Laura Weiner could flurry a little. There was a welcome payoff at the end of a long, anthemically swaying crescendo where pianist Daniel Schlosberg relished the chance to pounce on some icy, glittering, microtonally-tuned upper-register chords and nonchalantly breathtaking downward cascades. From there he continued with an disquieting, emphatic attack, the winds wafting a distant unease.

The quintet marched through persistently troubled trills to a lull punctuated by icepick piano accents and then a rather stern drive out that left no easy answers. What a breathtaking piece of music! As enjoyable as the rest of the program was, it was anticlimactic.

But there were plenty of rewarding moments. Two more contiguous partitas provided opportunities for the group to flex very diverse skillsets. In a small handful of Valerie Coleman‘s Portraits of Langston suite, for flute, clarinet and piano, Baker and Fingland playing dynamically shifting blues-inflected phrases over Schlosberg’s assertive chords and accents. The slow tectonic shifts and gentle Scheherezade whirls of Joan Tower’s Island Prelude made a moody contrast, at least until the wind-and-horn quartet kicked in with a series of animated flights and pulses.

And Louise Farrenc’s expansive, warmly Beethovenesque Sextet in C minor, Op. 40, with Schlosberg’s invitingly consonant melody rippling through nocturnal swells and the winds’ countermelodies, wound up the concert with a cocooning elegance.

The Neave Trio Rescue Obscure Treasures by Women Composers

The Neave Trio – violinist Anna Williams, cellist Mikhail Veselov and pianist Eri Nakamura – go looking more deeply for obscure treasures than most classical ensembles. Their previous album comprised the only known piano trios by Debussy, Fauré, and Roussel. Their new album Her Voice – streaming at Spotify  – is a rare recording of three pieces by pioneering women composers Louise Farrenc, Amy Beach and Rebecca Clarke. The ensemble are bringing those rarely performed works to life at Subculture on Nov 10 at 11 AM. Cover is $20; breakfast snacks (and presumably coffee) are included.

The first work on the album is Farrenc’s Piano Trio in E-flat Major, Op. 33. The first woman to teach at the Paris Conservatory, she was highly regarded as both a pianist and composer throughout the mid-19th century. Don’t let the relentless cheer of the opening movement fool you into thinking that this is just faux-Schubert: proto-Jeff Lynne is more like it. The devious playfulness of the piano and cello underneath Williams’ emotive phrasing is hard to resist.

The second movement has the same translucent appeal, more sedately at first; the Bach-like counterpoint midway through is a neat trick. Movement three shifts abruptly from a generic minuet to a nocturnal theme, rising from steady and muted to a bracing variation on the triumphant opening theme, Nakamura’s icepick precision contrasting with Williams’ phantasmagorical broken chords. The trio vigorously synopsize this confidently mainstream piece of mid-1800s classicism with Farrenc’s dynamically shifting final movement

Beach’s Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 150, written in 1938, is her last major work. Nakamura’s eerily starlit phrasing sails over the similarly uneasy strings, fueling a stern, striking crescendo in the first movement. The three musicians waltz with a ghostly calm through the opening of the second movement. It’s nostalgia in disguise, followed by lively, early Debussy-esque quasi-ragtime. They wind it up with propulsive allusions to boogie-woogie juxtaposed with unsettled nocturnal gleam.

As an early 20th century orchestral violist, Clarke broke the gender barrier in more than one ensemble. Her only piano trio, from 1921, is a stunningly powerful piece of music, a major work that deserves to be part of the standard repertoire. It begins with the same restless, rippling intensity as Beach’s trio, only more so, quickly receding to a brooding, Ravel-esque theme anchored by a belltone pulse. Veselov gets to play a more acerbic, prominent role here more than in the two previous works. Maybe because Clarke was a violist, Williams is similarly enabled to air out her incisive midrange for maximum impact.

The second movement has a gorgeous menace, coldly jeweled piano against stark string harmonies, along with an unlikely, Dvorak-like homesick quality. The marionettish dance and wounded longing in the final movement are as impactful as anything Stravinsky ever wrote. What a treat it is to discover this via such an impassioned performance.