Uneven voltage from Trio Valtorna at Winter Chamber Music Fest

Mon Jan 13, 2025 at 12:31 pm

By Lawrence A. Johnson

Trio Valtorna performed Sunday at the Winter Chamber Music Festival in Evanston. Photo: Bernard Mindich

One doesn’t expect an accompanying light show at a classical chamber event but such was the inadvertent case at Trio Valtorna’s concert Sunday afternoon at the Winter Chamber Music Festival in Evanston.

No sooner had the three musicians walked onstage at Northwestern University’s Pick-Staiger Concert Hall than all the lights went out, leaving the room in complete darkness. The lights soon came back on allowing the concert to start, albeit leaving the stage in very dim illumination for most of the first half. Near the end, the lights suddenly came on at full beam, adding to the distractions.

Mercifully, whatever tech fixes were employed at intermission seemed to work and the lighting was both appropriate and stable for the second half.

The Trio Valtorna musicians—horn player David Jolley, violinist Ida Kavafian and pianist Gilles Vonsattel—were good-natured about the glitches and took them in stride like the seasoned professionals they are. Still, one has to wonder if the distractions unsettled the players, since technical lapses by the group’s two senior members intermittently surfaced Sunday, much like the on-and-off lighting.

The concert began, aptly, with Twilight Music by John Harbison. This single movement of 18 minutes subtly explores the colors and timbres of the three contrasting instruments, alone and in combination, cast in the American composer’s brand of nuanced, elliptical Romanticism. The work opens with meditative music for violin and horn apart, suggestive a kind of meditation at dusk. The piano enters and the music grows more assertive, leading to passages of pulsing insistence before returning to the widely spaced introspection of the opening measures.

Jolley showed that he can still get around the intricacies of Harbison’s horn writing 40 years after giving the premiere of Twilight Music (with James Buswell and Richard Goode for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center). At times one wanted more incisive playing from Kavafian, who had her pitchy moments. Vonsattel, however, was superb throughout, firmly anchoring the performance with weight and understated elegance. The sweet melancholy of the final pages was sensitively rendered by all in this atmospheric performance.

Jolley was spelled for the concert’s centerpiece, Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 3 in E flat major, Op. 12, no. 3. Unlike his first two essays in the genre, Beethoven’s Third Violin Sonata is a kind of Throwback Thursday to the more Classical form where the piano is dominant and the violin takes a more supporting role.

Yet Kavafian’s assertive approach seemed to belie that description, as she played forcefully from the jump. In general, the duo delivered a capable reading with the Mozartian high spirits of the concluding Rondo coming off most successfully. While Kavafian brought graceful feeling to the central Adagio, the potential depths of the slow movement—one of Beethoven’s most profound early inspirations—went largely unplumbed. Ultimately, this Beethoven outing suffered from an unequal partnership, with the violinist’s playing lacking polish and expressive subtlety, no match for Vonsattel’s easy bravura and sparking virtuosity.

The afternoon concluded with Brahms’ Horn Trio, still the one cornerstone work for this combination (though Ligeti’s Horn Trio has gradually worked its way into the chamber literature).

Sunday’s reading was most effective in the elegiac passages of the two slow movements, music that Brahms completed not long after the death of his mother. Vonsattel was, again, the fulcrum of the performance while Jolley and Kavafian, sensitively conveyed the nostalgia that permeates those inward pages; indeed, Kavafian’s sweet-toned violin provided her finest playing of the afternoon.

It was Jolley whose playing seemed technically challenged this time–underprojected in the bumptious Scherzo and unsteady in the bravura finale where the veteran hornist had difficulties surmounting the hurdles of Brahms’ virtuosic writing.

The Winter Chamber Music Festival continues 7:30 p.m. Friday with the Vertavo Quartet performing music of Ravel, Britten, and Elizabeth Maconchy. music.northwestern.edu

Posted in Performances


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