Arkel Chamber Live shows: Underneath a Veil of Stars. Franz Schubert: piano trio in E flat; Kevin Lau: piano trio. Winona Zelenka, cello; Marie Bérard, violin; Philip Chiu, piano. Could 18, 2025, Trinity St-Paul’s Centre, Toronto.
Per week after the cherry blossoms bloomed, when town grew to become gloomy once more, the prospect of listening to Schubert performed stay on a Sunday afternoon promised to be a delight.
However, earlier than we heard the music of that grasp, we had been met with the live performance’s namesake: Kevin Lau’s Underneath A Veil of Stars, a 25-minute piano trio made up of three dreamy actions.
Kevin Lau: Piano Trio
Within the present’s opening remarks, co-founder and violinist Marie Berard instructed the viewers it was based mostly on a brief story by Lau a few woman who chases and catches stars. With that picture in thoughts, then, we’re ushered into the piece, which, together with Bérard, is splendidly dropped at life by co-founder and cellist Winona Zelenka and the visitor of the Arkel Chamber Live performance, the acclaimed pianist Philip Chiu, whose sleek, nimble fingers are well-suited to evoke the picture of the celebrities, which, by turns, twinkle and burst, eliciting his impassioned head jerks.
Chiu is the type of pianist whose arms, having dashed off a observe, stay suspended within the air for a while, recovering from the affect of its utterance, a notable gesture of his.
Bérard, elegant, whose violin gave voice to anxiousness within the work, trilled and thrilled.
However close to the tip of the primary motion, it’s Zelenka, in her modest outfit, whose instrument will get the prospect to shine. In a solo that evoked the “unabashed romanticism” and “simmering feelings” Bérard had advantageously warned us to be delicate to, she ravishes.
The cello channeled the message of the piece, which — earlier than our eyes and inside our ears — matured, motion to motion, from juvenile bewilderment to adolescent resentment and at last to lived-in grief, the place refrains from the previous can glimmer on the edges of the thoughts.
What I admired in regards to the piano trio was witnessing the way in which the music circulated by means of the devices, so that there have been moments they had been in full concord, and others after they conjured up a darkish discordance, punctuated by plucked strings and eighth notes.
For lengthy stretches Lau’s work can seem like ambiguous, impenetrable, till, impulsively, it springs into motion: racing, whirling, transcending in direction of states of transcendence.
The third motion, In That Shoreless Ocean…, relies on Rabindranath Tagore’s poem “Sail Away,” which ends, “Who is aware of when the chains will likely be off/and the boat/just like the final glimmer of sundown, vanish into the evening?” Within the last motion, Lau slows issues down and permits the uncertainty of that last line to announce itself by means of the Chiu’s dramatic aptitude, which expresses its wit and mischievousness en path to the piece’s tempered, tranquil finish.
Schubert: Piano Trio No. 2
“I’ve had sufficient applause,” Chiu mentioned after the intermission, throughout his introduction of Schubert’s Piano Trio No.2 in E-flat Main.
By way of a collection of info — his early demise, his syphilis, his fame as a curmudgeon — Chiu declared Schubert “essentially the most emo of composers” and a “poet-painter” (a time period which curiously echos the “pianist-painter” La Presse had dubbed Chiu himself).
It stays true that Schubert succeeds in evoking a stirring sense of melancholy, which is most evident within the second motion, the notorious “Andante Con Moto,” almost 200 years after its first public efficiency. It was in these moments that the efficiency of the piece enhanced the fantastic thing about it; first Chiu performs a chorus, adopted by Zelenka, then Bérard — an order which Schubert, masterfully, reverses within the fourth motion, “Allegro moderato,” creating the feeling that they construct upon one another’s articulation individually earlier than forming a collective.
Their classical interpretation of the piano trio meant the piece remained acquainted, leading to moments when it was simple to lose one’s consideration within the sunny opulence, the place the photographs of ballrooms, candlelight, and silk attire from movies like Barry Lyndon appeared earlier than our eyes.
What I gleaned about Schubert was the way in which that his music behaved, which, related and complimentary to Lau’s sensibility, appeared to copy a thoughts traversing by means of a crowd, taking on the earth round them, earlier than turning inwards and travelling down digressive trains of thought which are immediately — and that is its revitalizing impact — disrupted by a buoyant spirit that, regardless of its energy, can by no means absolutely escape a pure despair that exists deep inside every of us.
Within the fourth motion, the pressure of Berard’s violin involves the fore, main the dialog amongst them, alternately synchronizing and devolving to a purely ecstatic impact.
Ultimate Ideas
Close to the tip of the efficiency, as a musical phrase as soon as once more travelled between them like a secret, I appeared up on the excessive ceilings of the Trinity St. Paul’s Centre and the solar shone brilliant by means of the stain-glass, and simply then the trio’s chorus, which, up till then, had been mournful, turned blithe.
This second jogged my memory of a scene early on in Henry James’ 1881 novel The Portrait of a Girl, when Isabel Archer, looking for her aunt all through Gardencourt and fearing her uncle could also be lifeless, is given pause by “an sudden sound — the sound of low music continuing apparently from the saloon.” She enters the room and discovers Madame Merle “taking part in one thing of Schubert’s — Isabel knew not what, however acknowledged Schubert — and he or she touched the piano with a discretion of her personal.”
After her efficiency, Isabel praises her, including that her sickly uncle would profit from listening to such beautiful music, however Madame Merle discriminates.
“I’m afraid there are moments in life when even Schubert has nothing to say to us,” she says to her: “We should admit, nevertheless, that they’re our worst.”
What a pleasure it was then, that afternoon, to not have been in a type of moments, however to have had the privilege and pleasure to be in that one, the place we might hear what Lau needed to say and listen to once more — thus anew — to Schubert too: a re-affirmation that three is a magic quantity.
By: Nirris Najendrarajah for LvT
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