United States Music Mondays – Fauré, Meyer, Schubert: Paul Appleby (tenor), Claremont Trio. Advent Lutheran Church, New York, 19.5.2025. (RP)
Fauré – Piano Trio in D minor, Op.120
Jessica Meyer – Shadow Songs
Schubert – Piano Trio No.2 in E-flat major, D.929
What does a star tenor of the Metropolitan Opera do on his night off? If it is tenor Paul Appleby, currently appearing as Caesar in John Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra at the Met, he sings the premiere of a new song cycle. For Music Monday’s final concert of the season, Appleby and the Claremont Trio performed Jessica Meyer’s moving Shadow Songs for tenor and piano trio.
Music Mondays presents free chamber music concerts at Advent Lutheran Church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Completed in 1900, the church is notable for its many stained-glass windows designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The ceramic mosaic behind the altar, the sanctuary lamps, the pews and the painted decorative organ frontal pipes are also Tiffany designs. For this concert, the church was filled with standees on both sides of the sanctuary.
Violinist Emily Bruskin and cellist Julia Bruskin are founding members of the Claremont Trio, formed at The Juilliard School in 1999. Appleby was not the only musician at this concert affiliated with the Met, as the twin sisters are members of the Met Orchestra. Georgian-born Sophiko Simsive, who has toured in North America, Asia and Europe, is the Claremont Trio’s pianist.
The concert opened with a shimmering reading of Fauré’s Piano Trio in D minor. Fauré was 78 when he composed it in 1923, shortly after retiring as Director of the Conservatoire de Paris. Maurice Ravel, Georges Enescu and Nadia Boulanger were among his students. While composing the Piano Trio, Fauré was in ill-health, complaining of ‘perpetual fatigue’ and loss of hearing, and he died the following year.
The three players gave an elegant reading of the Piano Trio, infusing its melodies with refinement, beauty and deep emotion. Of particular loveliness was the Andantino middle movement, with its long lyrical lines passing seamlessly from one instrument to another. The fatigue that Fauré complained about is absent in the concluding Allegro vivo, played with zest by the Trio. There is humor in it too: a recurring motive which sounds like Canio’s cries of ‘Ridi, Pagliaccio’ in the aria ‘Vesti la giubba’ from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci prompted knowing smiles.
Jessica Meyer started her career as a composer in 2014. Her first recording, Ring Out, a collection of her vocal works, was released in 2019 and debuted at Number 1 on the Billboard Traditional Classical Chart. Her works have been performed in venues from the Kennedy Center to Carnegie Hall, by musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic and other ensembles across the country.
For Shadow Songs, Meyer set three poems by violinist, composer and writer Giancarlo Latta. He uses the Upper West Side as a backdrop for intimate interior dialogues in which a lover expresses his inner thoughts, feelings and reflections on the end of a relationship. Latta’s text is spare and direct, but it contains depths of emotion, as does the imagery he paints so precisely, such as a cupped hand holding all the couple’s unspoken words, or the Central Park Reservoir as a place of wonder and foreboding.
The first song, ‘Riverside Park, Late Summer’, captures the moment a lover realizes a relationship is over and senses that her hand resting on his knee will be the last time they ever touch. It ends with the image of all of the lovers’ unspoken words being released to the skies, to the sounds of the instrumentalists exhaling to evoke the gentle breeze that lifts them skyward.
‘Interlude (Snow Angel)’, which has the most sophisticated structure of the three poems, traces the terror and desolation that grip the man on a snowy winter night. Meyer’s setting begins with a dialogue between violin and cello that conveys the abandoned lover’s agitation and loneliness. With the entry of the voice, declamatory passages alternate with tender, anguished expressions of yearning and ultimately release.
In ‘Spring’, the lover remembers sailing toy boats on the Central Park Reservoir as a child. Even then, he realized the pool of water could swallow his boat, and that beautiful things, including relationships (as he would come to learn), could crack and disappear. The song ends with the violin playing dreamy spiccato passages over a sustained drone in the cello and chords in the piano. Above these rippling, ephemeral watery sounds, the man grasps a glimpse of his new reality.
Meyer set Latta’s words to music with a naturalness that releases their meaning and the exquisite, poignant feelings they contain. Her writing for violin, cello and piano is equally expressive. The songs were composed for Appleby, and the musical lines rest easily in his voice, enabling him to project the text with impressive clarity. The beauty of his voice was always present, even when he was expressing the darkest emotions. His finest moments were in the inner dialogues in ‘Interlude (Snow Angel)’, which he sang in tones of exquisite pureness and simplicity.
The final work was Schubert’s Piano Trio in D minor, written as his health declined in November 1827. It is one of the few pieces Schubert composed during a final outburst of creativity which he then heard in concert before his death in December of the following year. As they had throughout the program, the Trio performed with meticulous attention to detail and dynamics, mining the array of colors and feelings in the music. Emily Bruskin and cellist Julia Bruskin played as one, while Simsive’s attention to dynamics and phrasing was equally impressive.
Rick Perdian