The U.S. premiere of "The Three Dancers" by Elena Kats-Chernin found favor with chamber music fans at Saturday's concert in the Alaska Airlines Autumn Classics series.
It is rare for a new work to strike a chord, so to speak, in a genre most associated with Mozart and Brahms, but series director Zuill Bailey must have sensed "Dancers" would be an exception when, at the last minute, the piece was moved from its announced spot as the preintermission number, the usual placement for modern music, to the honored position of program finale.
The classical trio configuration of Bailey on cello, violinist Gil Morgenstern and pianist Piers Lane was joined in this work by bass player Joel Stamoolis, saxophonist Jeff Brayfield, percussionist C. David Williamson and Susan Reed, using an electric keyboard to play the notes originally delegated to an accordion. The electronic substitution may have meant that the performance lost some of the breathiness of a real accordion, but it worked well enough in the big picture.
"Dancers" is inspired by a Picasso painting said to refer to the deaths of people close to the artist. The composer establishes the mood of a totentanz immediately with unrelenting tone clusters from the piano, marched off in the grimmest, most unrelenting 4/4 meter imaginable. The pulse is also reminiscent of Spanish dance or a severe tango, but with repeated chords and snippets of phases that generally fall short of becoming melody.
The piece has a tense, coffeehouse ambiance. Think Astor Piazzolla without the frantic swings, or William Bolcom without the inconsequentiality.
The drama becomes particularly intense in a center section flanked by two waltz movements, the second of which has the closest thing to a tune in the piece. Lack of singability is the great weak spot in contemporary music, but in "Dancers" it doesn't seem to matter. The formidable recurring rhythm says it all. The totentanz concludes with the bass drum bringing a sense of dread and inevitability as it joins the ensemble and takes over everything. It made a powerful conclusion to the piece and the program.
"Dancers" shared the last half of the evening with Rachmaninoff's very early "Trio Eligiac" in G Minor. On one hand the rich, roiling lyricism of the work was a night-and-day contrast with Kats-Chernin's stark music. But it seemed as if they were reflecting the same emotion. The Rachmaninoff begins with plain throbs on open strings, not unlike the minimalism that opened "Dancers." We should also note that both composers were originally from the Soviet Union before emigrating to the West.
In the first half of the concert, Morgenstern, Bailey and Lane delivered full and fiery readings of Haydn's gypsy-influenced "Piano Trio in G Major" and Beethoven's "Ghost" Trio. Each of the four pieces on the program was presented as if it were the only piece on the program, which made for the kind of evening the listener will fondly recall for years to come.