Eighth Notes

A March 18 recital by Dr. David Severtson for the Emerson Cultural Series at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Door County introduced a winsome young pianist to Door County. Severtson is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and coordinator of the piano program there. For his program, he chose an ambitious trio of works by early Romantic period composers: Schumann, Chopin and Schubert. Before each work, he shared notes he had prepared, cogent mini-essays on the composer’s musical character and significance.

Robert Schumann’s Papillons (butterflies) is an early work (Opus 2) and something of a study for his Op. 9 Carnaval which came a few years later. This collection of short pieces holds abrupt contrasts, here well-managed by Severtson. Chopin’s Ballade in A-flat major has challenged countless pianists, but Severtson managed a reading both forthright and elegant.

Schubert’s Sonata in B-flat major, his valedictory work in this form, had been the final work on Alfred Brendel’s Chicago program a week and a half earlier. A vast work, it poses issues of architecture, balancing complexity and simplicity and meeting some technical obstacles that emerge with surprising suddenness. Severtson’s take encompassed all the essential elements; a snag that stopped him momentarily in the final movement came at the very spot that has flummoxed any number of celebrated artists. In all, it was a logical and urgent performance, one that revealed both the work’s scale and its heart-wrenching beauty.

Last week, we received from Chris Brubeck a copy of the new Brubeck Brothers Quartet CD, Classified (Koch KIC-CD-7744). In the note he included, he observed that yours truly had been quoted (twice) in the liner notes (we’re blushing). The encomiums we awarded the quartet’s Birch Creek performance in 2006, however, were entirely appropriate; this is one of the tightest, most fecund jazz quartets ever. Each member (Chris Brubeck, bass and trombone; Dan Brubeck, drums; Mike DeMicco, guitar; and Chuck Lamb, piano) contributes at the highest imaginable level, maintaining a heart-pounding measure of energy. This CD presents the quartet in somewhat mellower mode, but the creativity is just as high. Moreover, there are three tracks devoted to Chris’s Vignettes for Nonet, a genre-stretching work of real quality and interest in which the quartet is joined by the Imani Winds. Strongly recommended.

Those who have followed the events surrounding the Metropolitan Opera’s current revival of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde have read of cancellations, singers succumbing to illness during performance, a Tristan sliding down the raked stage to the prompter’s box.

One good thing, though. For the broadcast performance, the Met sent out a plea to Berlin to release American tenor Robert Dean Smith for the event and audiences were treated to a superb performance: accurate, unflagging, ringing – and beautiful.