New York Classical Review

The Village Trip Festival, which opened last week, celebrates the artistic and social history of Greenwich Village. On Sunday night the festival presented an appropriately quirky classical music program at the Greenwich House Music School.

The Horszowski Trio played piano trios: contemporary music; works from the post-WWII American avant-garde; and one substantial piece of the core 19ᵗʰ century repertoire. That was the Brahms Piano Trio No. 2, which came after intermission. 

For the first half, violinist Jesse Mills, cellist Ole Akahoshi, and pianist Reiko Aizawa played William Kentner Anderson’s Piano Trio, “25 Decades,” then a compact medley of Augusta Read Thomas, Morton Feldman, and John Cage.

That last was subtitled “Homage to the New York School,” and provided the Village connection. Though not strictly Village musicians—Feldman lived in Brooklyn, Cage first in Chinatown, then the edge of Chelsea—the New York School of Composers were embedded in the cultural life of the Village. Feldman spent many hours at the Cedar Tavern on 8th street in the company of Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, and other painters, while Cage was teaching at the New School for Social Research. 

That was the core of the concert and central to the festival’s idea, and it was bracketed a little awkwardly, but not necessarily uncomfortably, by the opening and closing music.

Those pieces had more to do with each other than the homage. Anderson was on hand to introduce his piece, and he related it to Brahms in the sense of sharing the virtue of putting compositional structure and form in front of the intuitive impulses of personal expression—more classicism than romanticism. 

Anderson’s structure mirrored the quirkiness of the program. The piece begins with a scherzo, an emphasis on short, rhythmic phrases batted between the musicians. With the energy from the trio, this sounded more Stravinskyian than Brahmsian, though without rhythmic displacement or switching meters.

Just as the playing began hitting a groove, the piece segued into a second, slower section where Anderson made an instrumental setting of Gillian Welch’s song, “My Morphine.” This was nicely done on its own straightforward terms—though the instrumentation, especially a sweet violin, added some odd sentimentality to it. Still, it confused the picture between the ostensible centering of compositional process and the willfulness of personal impulses. A song is a song about what the writer feels, after all.

The homage section was all brief pieces, played solo. It began with Thomas’ piano Elude No. 5, “Rain at Funeral: Homage to Morton Feldman.” Aizawa played this with a clear, delicate touch, and the slow spaciousness of the music is a response to Feldman, though more of an imitation than an acceptance. Akahoshi then played Feldman’s Projection 1, Feldman’s first indeterminate, graphic score. As such, it’s open to artistic interpretation and judgement, and Akahoshi’s thinking was excellent on all counts. With a sinewy tone, he played every event with the deliberate certainty that the note belonged exactly in the space, and the silence was equally well crafted.

Feldman’s solo violin work, For Aaron Copland, is a later work, strictly notated and with a focus on both space and timbre. Mills’ playing was also terrific, one could hear the specific note and rest values that are the structure of the music, and his intonation with the practice mute in place was lovely, whispery but not raspy, with a sense of quiet fullness. 

The finale of this stretch was Aizawa playing Cage’s Suite for Toy Piano, on a bright and well-tuned instrument. Like her colleagues, this was a marvelously clear expression of all the music’s features.

What Brahms had to do this was, nothing, really. But the Village was a bohemian scene, and that means an eclectic one, so, why not? 

The Piano Trio No. 2 didn’t start auspiciously; both listeners’ ears and, seemingly, the musicians’ thinking were still in the New York School space of music that allows the mind to find its own responses. Brahms, on the other hand, tells you how to respond, and it took some time to reorient oneself while the musicians also took some time to get back into this old-school feeling.

When that happened, about halfway through the first movement, everything was fine. The Andante con moto had just the right emotional force, and in the final two movements all the elements of tempo, dynamics (which were excellent throughout), and the rhythms fell into place. That was the compositional side, and on the expressive side, the Horszowski Trio produced just enough Brahms to balance, but not overpower, the New York School.

The Village Trip Festival continues at various venues through October 4. The Cygnus Ensemble and singers perform songs by Samuel Adler, Victoria Bond, Dina Koston, and Nehemiah Luckett, 7:30 p.m., October 1, at St. Luke in the Fields Church. thevillagetrip.com