McGill and Ax woo, then wow, an intimate gathering at Zankel Hall
Clarinetist Anthony McGill was playing a pleasantly intimate recital Thursday night at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall, when he let his accompanist play a solo. Something about “Moonlight.”
Fireworks ensued—because the pianist was Emanuel Ax, and the piece was that early Beethoven barnburner, the Sonata in C-sharp minor, Op. 27, no. 2, the “Moonlight” Sonata.
The audience roared as the pianist crushed the final chords of the sonata’s Presto agitato finale, and it took the duo a while to restore order with Florence Price’s lyrical Adoration.
Everything else about Thursday’s program had the informal air of a home musicale, from the close-in seating of Zankel in its arena configuration to the players’ speaking to the audience between numbers, with a cream-center assortment of mostly short pieces.
And forget about “accompanist.” The two musicians—one the much-admired principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic, the other a mainstay of solo and chamber music performances here for half a century—received equal billing for the event, and McGill began the evening by confessing a feeling of awe at performing “with this guy at Carnegie Hall.”
The lidless grand piano stood in the center of the room, and the clarinetist played from the usual location in the curve of the piano, facing half the audience. Just so the other half wouldn’t feel left out, the piano was rotated 180 degrees at intermission.
The musical soirée began with a set that Robert Schumann actually called “Soirée Pieces” before changing the title to Fantasiestücke (Fantasy Pieces), Op. 73. The set of three pieces was designed to gain energy as it went along, the mood progressing from tender to playful to fiery.
In the first, McGill’s inward musings were even more elusive with his back to the listener, while Ax’s piano roiled with Schumann’s characteristic counterpoint. The next two were more extroverted, one with rollicking scales for both players and the other with passionate spurting phrases and an accelerando coda—an agreeable variety, all within the bounds of “soirée music.”
In a composer’s note, Jessie Montgomery described herself as “making peace with sadness” during the Covid pandemic, and a short piece for violin and piano titled Peace was the result. On Thursday, McGill played a transcription the composer made for him, spinning out soft, sustained phrases while Ax supported with gently rocking, jazz-tinged chords.
The concert poked its head a little above the soirée level with the Sonata in A minor that Schubert composed to display the capabilities of a now forgotten instrument, the short-lived guitar-cello contraption called the arpeggione. The first movement proved to be quite a test for the clarinet, inflecting the sturdy opening theme in reedy tones, mellowing for the lyrical second theme, negotiating what were fast string-crossing passages in the original, and sustaining a pure, consistent tone from bottom to top of its range. The audience couldn’t restrain its applause at the movement’s assertive close.
The sonata’s Adagio was distinguished by long, arching clarinet phrases, superbly supported as McGill slipped from piano into pianissimo, with Ax providing deep bass resonance even in the softest dynamic. The well-balanced duo evoked the finale’s ever shifting moods, high-stepping at first, then floating and legato, with a dash of minor-key gypsy fire here and a moment of nostalgia there, before the sonata’s gentle close.
Following intermission, Ax’s Beethoven solo was arresting from first note to last. The pianist found eloquence even in the slow progress of the bass octaves in the first movement. The melody rose above them to a peak of suffocated emotion, and one could hear heartbreak in its final descent.
The brief Allegretto was touching in its attempt to be carefree, but one felt the weight of the syncopations in its trio. The pianist did more than display his digital prowess in the furious finale; he drew out the dramatic tension all the way to the final dissonant catastrophes and the crushing end.
“How to follow that?” McGill said, drawing a chuckle from the now breathless audience. The answer was to play something completely different: a transcription of Florence Price’s tender, luminous organ piece Adoration, presumably evoking a biblical scene of the Magi at the infant Christ’s manger. The pianist artfully imitated the organ’s layered timbres and subtle counterpoints, but no organ could produce the melting phrases of McGill’s clarinet in the long-breathed melody.
The clarinetist did not exactly translate the title of Ad anah?, the three-minute piece for clarinet and piano by James Lee III, except to say it was inspired by “a prayer.” The leisurely clarinet spoke in a mix of speech-like phrases, trills, and long notes, while the piano’s impressionistic swirls and ripples carried the music to a climactic high note before the descent to a calm close. Afterward, the composer rose from his seat in the front row to share in the warm applause.
Leonard Bernstein was 24 years old and not yet the toast of New York and the world when he composed his Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, whose first movement in particular shows many signs of having been composed in the heyday of Hindemith, Les Six, and particularly Bernstein’s mentor Aaron Copland.
McGill and Ax crafted a melodious and humorous performance of that movement, the piano airy and insouciant, the clarinet rich-toned in its creamy middle register. Timbres soon to be heard in West Side Story appeared in the finale’s high, widely spaced chords, and there was a Latin swagger to the fast sections in 5/8 meter. Ax kept the beat crisp and light while McGill sliced and chopped with sassy phrases right up to the sudden forte finish.
The duo answered the appreciative applause with a soulful encore, which McGill filched from his English horn-playing colleague in the Philharmonic: the theme from the Largo of Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, “From the New World,” later arranged as the spiritual “Goin’ Home.”
Then, pleading a tired lip, McGill (and his pianist colleague) went home.
Carnegie Hall presents the Brentano String Quartet in an all-Haydn program at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, 7 p.m. Thursday. carnegiehall.org
One Response to “McGill and Ax woo, then wow, an intimate gathering at Zankel Hall”
Leave a Comment
Posted Feb 07, 2025 at 2:23 pm by R. Singer
Truly eloquent description of this performance , which filled the hall with an unusual combination of musical brilliance and phenomenal intimacy. We were both wooed and wowed!