A Bride, a Groom, and Wolves Fuel a Chilling West Coast Premiere at Music@Menlo

Writing for San Francisco Classical Voice, Steven Winn reviews the West Coast premiere of Les Noces Rouges, the red wedding, a piano quintet by the British-Australian composer Sir Stephen Hough drawn from a tragic episode in Willa Cather's 1918 novel My Antonia. The story concerns a bride and groom who, on a drunken sleigh ride across the Russian steppes, are pitched out into the snow and killed by wolves. Hough was so struck by the tale that he transmuted it into a passionate and cunningly constructed piece of chamber music. It was performed on Sunday, July 26, at the Spieker Center for the Arts at Menlo School, with the composer at the keyboard and the Viano String Quartet as his partners. The music begins with the sombre strains of an Orthodox wedding hymn. No sooner have the strings spun out their long lines than the piano takes up the theme and tilts the harmonies, as if teasingly foreshadowing the disaster to come, a technique that runs through the whole work. Then, as though a camera were dollying into the bridal chamber, comes rapturously lyrical love music that brings Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff to mind. As the wedding party begins, a quotation from a Russian drinking song takes hold. Soon, as if the players themselves had grown tipsy, pitches begin to wobble and harmonies to teeter. The dances turn boisterous and unruly, the strings keen, and the pianist slams the keyboard a few times. For the sleigh ride, Hough sets a repeated figure in motion to suggest the dogged, doomed progress of the horse-drawn sleigh; as in Ravel's Bolero or Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, the Leningrad, the passage drives on while the strings wail through weaving glissandi and dissonant attacks. The horses stumbling in the drift and the wolves closing in are keenly drawn and played with desperate urgency. Even as the deaths loom, the music glances back at the hymn and the drinking song, catching them as distorted memories lost in time. Near the end, Hough sounds fateful church-bell chords. But there is no redemption and no release, only the musical embodiment of travellers out on a fateful cold night. The piece capped a programme called The Unfolding of Music, running from the Baroque era to the present. The concert had opened with a Telemann concerto the critic found disciplined but charmless; by contrast, it was a pleasure to hear the violinists Aaron Boyd and Stella Chen return after the interval and turn nine Bartok miniatures for two violins into a small essay on expressive tone and temperament, including a witty evocation of bagpipes. Schumann's Andante and Variations for two pianos, two cellos and horn was another highlight, the ensemble by turns majestic, martial, playful and poignant, with the pianists Wu Han and Hyeyeon Park in the leading roles. Wu Han and her cellist husband David Finckel, who founded the festival in 2003, conclude twenty-four years as co-artistic directors at the end of this summer; the festival itself runs through August 8. Against that backdrop, the critic notes two touching moments between the pair during the Schumann: twice in the piece they had a few measures largely to themselves, and in the midst of an energetic performance those bars spoke gorgeously.