United States Dvořák, Fauré – Curtis on Tour: Roberto Diaz (viola), Trio Zimbalist (Josef Špaček [violin], Timotheos Gavriilidis-Petrin [cello], George Xiaoyuan Fu [piano]). Buttenwieser Hall, 92nd St Y, New York, 28.2.2024. (TM)
Dvořák – Piano Trio No.4 in E minor, Op.90 (‘Dumky’)
Fauré – Piano Quartet No.1 in C minor, Op.15
Efrem Zimbalist is mainly remembered as one of the consummate violinists of the twentieth century. But he also left an indelible stamp on the Curtis Institute as part of its violin faculty and, later, the director, influencing generations of young musicians at the world-renowned conservatory in Philadelphia over a four-decade span. Named in his honor, Trio Zimbalist is an ensemble comprising distinguished Curtis alums: violinist Josef Špaček (class of ’09), cellist Timotheos Gavriilidis-Petrin (’17), and pianist George Xiaoyuan Fu (’16).
The Trio made their New York debut with this performance. It was part of the ongoing Curtis on Tour initiative, which presents emerging artists who have trained at Curtis in concert alongside celebrated Curtis faculty and alumni — on this occasion, the internationally acclaimed violist Roberto Díaz, who graduated from Curtis in 1984, joined the faculty in 2000 and has served as President and CEO since 2007.
The concert comes on the heels of their debut album (a trio of trios, released on the school’s recently launched in-house label, Curtis Studio), which Gramophone has named an Editor’s Choice for March 2024. Playing without intermission in the intimate Buttenwieser Hall at the 92nd St Y, Trio Zimbalist began with one of Dvořák’s best-loved chamber works, the so-called ‘Dumky Trio’ in E minor from 1891 (a hit on the composer’s farewell tour in his Czech homeland before he sailed for New York to direct the National Conservatory).
With a score so familiar, there always seems to be an implicitly additional element of competition with past interpretations. But their account was free of self-conscious posturing and surprised with its vigorous freshness and vitality – as if they had just received the proofs from Brahms (who oversaw that stage of the piece’s publication). This was not only a matter of their persuasively idiomatic sound – Špaček previously served as the youngest concertmaster in the history of the Czech Philharmonic – but also resulted from their exciting chemistry and split-second exchange of ideas, which often gave the impression of a brilliant improvisation.
At the same time, each player projected a strikingly distinctive personality: passionate attacks from Špaček’s violin, with its plaintive high notes and lush lower register; full-bodied lyricism from Gavriilidis-Petrin; and eloquently phrased contributions from Fu, who also paid unwavering heed to sonic balance with his partners. You could focus on one of the three, like a favorite character in a novel, while also admiring the urgent symmetry of the ensemble.
The principle of the ‘dumka’, with its sudden changes of mood, seems better attuned than classical sonata form to a contemporary sensibility. The Zimbalists played up these contrasts, moving seamlessly from dreamy melancholy to unconstrained, foot-stomping folksiness. But they also gave Dvořák’s sequence of six ‘dumky’ a coherence that made them more than a series of character pieces.
A tension between abstract, stricter forms from the German tradition and a composer’s unique sensibility may have been the implicit link with Gabriel Fauré’s early Piano Quartet No.1 in C minor, first heard in 1880. The piece carries close biographical associations with the composer’s engagement to and subsequent rejection by Marianne Viardot, daughter of the diva Pauline Viardot (whose storied career provides the spine of the cultural historian Orlando Files’s fascinating study of nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism, The Europeans).
Roberto Díaz joined the Trio Zimbalist for what became a thrilling object lesson in the values of chamber music: the close listening to each other, the negotiation with the collective, the spur-of-the-moment shaping of a new loveliness. Playing the fabled ‘Tuscan Medici’ viola built by Stradivari in 1690, Díaz added a rich, complex sound to the texture – like shafts of sunlight beaming through clerestory windows.
Terse rhythmic cells in the opening movement contrasted with flowing cantabile of breathtaking beauty, while the musicians joined in a kind of mirthful virtuosity for the delightfully scored Scherzo. Regardless of whether the Adagio somehow processes Fauré’s grief over his rejection, the players traced an intensely inward, serene calm over its course. Their incisively phrased rhythms propelled the finale to heights of passion, which they amplified with bursts of quasi-orchestral sound.
Thomas May