Ives quartet and guest pianist treat audience to Ornstein – Mercury News Monday, January 30, 2006
By Richard Scheinin
The Ives Quartet is a stealth group, at least in the South Bay, where its remarkable concerts have been flying under the radar of chamber music enthusiasts. When will the local music community wake up to this exceptional string quartet, which is based right here in Santa Clara County?
Its Friday night concert at San Jose’s Le Petit Trianon was sensational; too bad the hall was mostly empty. The Ives, which in the past few months has taken on a new first violinist, Bettina Mussumeli, performed with a super-refinement that kept breaking out into a visceral, almost rock ‘n’ roll intensity. And the program — which reportedly drew larger audiences in Palo Alto and San Francisco over the weekend — was simply more interesting, and way riskier, than those offered by most chamber groups.
The concert tipped its hat to Mozart on his 250th birthday with the dark and obsessively layered Adagio and Fugue in C minor. It lasted about eight minutes — Boom! Happy Birthday, Wolfgang! Then came Beethoven’s String Quartet in C major, Op. 59, No. 3, one of his monumental, middle-period “Razumovsky” quartets. It received a lament-filled and gut-wrenching performance, building toward that fierce, beyond-the-speed-limit, trillion-noted fourth movement; Mussumeli left the stage flopping her right hand in the air, as if to cool it off.
But the concert’s real jewel was its West Coast premiere of Leo Ornstein’s Quintet for Piano and Strings, Op. 92 — written in 1927 and ravishingly performed Friday with guest pianist Janice Weber.
You say, “Leo who?”
Ornstein in his day was a superstar pianist, likened to Rachmaninoff for his dazzling, over-the-top technique, as well as a composer of considerable repute. Percy Grainger, the pianist and composer who was Ornstein’s contemporary, set him on the same level as Stravinsky and Scriabin.
History has a way of sorting things out and Ornstein added to the fading of his reputation by withdrawing from public performances around 1930, when he was in his late 30s.
Both lionized and condemned for playing his own jagged and futuristic piano works, as well as for championing the then-new music of Bartok, Schoenberg and Ravel, he had become “notorious,” said Severo Ornstein, his son, in introductory remarks to Friday’s performance. “A reticent person, fundamentally,” the composer withdrew from the public eye.
But what a life Ornstein had. Born in Russia in 1892 or 1893, he moved to New York as a boy and built his storied career. He played for an audience of 5,000 in Havana. He composed “Hebraic Fantasy,” for piano and violin, for Albert Einstein’s 50th birthday party in 1929; Einstein was his page turner. He composed his massive, eighth piano sonata when he was 98 or so and died in 2002, at nearly 110.
Severo Ornstein, a retired computer scientist in San Mateo County, spent a decade transcribing 2,500 pages of his father’s handwritten scores. Many can be viewed at www.otherminds.org/ ornstein, along with a biography of Ornstein and photographs of him as a young man. His piano quintet was “probably the best piece he ever wrote,” Severo Ornstein said.
Friday’s performance of the 40-minute work was panoramic: You could practically see the Russian steppes moving past, as if through the windows of a moving train. The performance was also brutally emotional, alive with arching, cantorial melodies set in unison for strings over the galloping, arpeggiating piano. All was in constant motion, propelled by big gestures: long-noted themes, obsessively explored; Stravinsky-esque rhythms; dashes of New York’s Jazz Age hustle and bustle.
The performance by the five musicians was unbridled and, yes, visceral, as classical music ought to be. The Ives’ next performances are in May: Check the quartet’s Web site at www.ivescollective.org for details.
Contact Richard Scheinin at rscheinin@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5069.