The Life, Death and Resurrection of St. Elvis
Once upon a time there were three musicians -- a pianist, cellist and violinist -- who had an unconventional approach to classical music. The usual thing for a piano trio is to work up a concert repertoire -- some Beethoven, Brahms, Shostakovich and Haydn, plus a few other odds and ends -- to dress up in formal wear and play these classics to sedate, respectful audiences in quiet concert halls. These three didn't do that. They named their trio "St. Elvis," they played music by relative unknowns such as Kalomiris, Weiner, and Muczynski, and they treated their audiences to the combination of passionate performance and onstage theatrics more commonly encountered at a rock concert. When their founding violinist dropped out they found another, younger and more gifted. The newly-configured trio shared an irreverent approach, an intense commitment to new music, and each of them had the good looks and charisma you'd expect in a pop star. When they caught the eye of a record producer and sat down to record their first album you'd have sworn they were on their way to being the biggest break-out act to hit chamber music since the Kronos Quartet.
Well, I'd have sworn it, anyway, when I was swept away by the power of their playing. What I should have remembered is what happens when volatile and creative people, whose gifts are matched by underlying insecurities, are subjected to the pressure that comes with a push for that big breakthrough. I am perhaps better placed than anyone to try to reconstruct the complicated story of how and why St. Elvis unraveled. There's nowhere near enough space here to tell that story. Suffice it to say that the trio did indeed begin to pull apart, and the album was never released. The violinist went his own way in California, and the cellist and pianist, formerly good friends, became estranged, with bitterness over the break-up for a long while thwarting any hope of reconciliation. As it happened, I remained in contact with both, and when the time came when forgiveness seemed possible, was able to help reopen the channels of communication and then watch with joy as they came back together again. It wasn't long before pianist Maria Choban and cellist Jerry Bobbe began to set aside time for a weekly playing session. As they rediscovered the pleasure of making music together, they began to realize that St. Elvis had been subject to a premature burial. The group had never restricted itself to the trio repertoire, and a program of music for cello and piano seemed the perfect way to let the world know that St. Elvis lives. This program of music from the Western Hemisphere continues Fireflight's mission to bring the public underplayed gems of American Music, and at the same time gives notice in no uncertain terms that St. Elvis is back in the building.
Pianist Maria Choban
The trouble with Maria Choban is that too few people have heard her play. Those who have are lavish with their praise: she's "an electrifying performer" (Oregonian critic David Stabler) and "one of the most extraordinary musicians with whom I have had the pleasure of working" (record producer Michael Fine) "a passionate performer" (American Record Guide's Jack Sullivan) who "has the training of a classical musician but the heart of a rocker." (James McQuillen, the Oregonian) and "whose forte is unrestrained drive and passion" (that last bit was me, writing for Willamette Week). You will notice, however, that only two of those comments come from outside the Pacific Northwest. Choban is a unique, world-class talent who has spent most of her life in a corner of the world far away from the major venues where you go to see stars. The question that must spring to the mind of anyone who hears her praised, or better still, hears her play, is "If she's that good, why haven't I heard of her?" There is no short answer to that one. Her career has been a series of blazing ascents followed by flaming crashes, and it's an open question why she hasn't yet sustained a long enough lift-off to take her into orbit.
Maria Choban was born in Oregon to Greek parents. When she was three years old she surprised her parents with her ability to pick out tunes she had heard on her toy piano. She began formal piano lessons at the age of five and at the age of seven became a student of Nellie Tholen, one of the Northwest's most respected piano teachers. During the following decade she advanced rapidly in her studies winning competitions and awards from the Oregon Music Teachers, Monday Music Club and Mu Phi Epsilon, a process that came to a climax when she won the Portland Junior Symphony Association's piano competition. Her concert with that symphony at age 20 was seen by one local writer as "a gratifying culmination of those auditions. She has the poise and confidence of a real professional" (Martin Clark, Oregon Journal). The reviewer couldn't know how quickly that "poise and confidence" could collapse. Maria's twenties were spent in disorderly retreat from the career that had beckoned so brightly. She tended bar and explored an assortment of available avenues for self-destruction. But her underlying spirit proved hard to break, and she couldn't run away from her talent forever. In time she bounced back. She teamed up with cellist Jerry Bobbe, rekindled her love of playing, and put together the brilliant iconoclastic trio St. Elvis. The ensemble of charismatic performers seemed destined to go all the way. They didn't. What followed was a bad break-up and another meltdown for Maria. This time she recovered more quickly-- she only lost half a decade-- and eventually launched a new partnership, a piano duo with Kenn Willson, and a new record label. Before long she had released three CDs and embarked upon two different projects, one to unearth forgotten classics of modern American music, and the other to bring the world the neglected art music of Greece. She suffered another setback when the effort of producing two disks in one summer left her exhausted and unable to sustain the promotional follow-up her creations deserved. This time she bounced back in under three years. Reunited with her old partner Jerry Bobbe she has raised St. Elvis from the grave. She's already looking forward to her next project in the Greek Music Series, a solo recording of the music of Theodokaris. Will she sustain the burn this time, and at last rocket to the
success her talent deserves? Stay tuned. It's been an exciting ride, and it
isn't over yet.
Cellist Jerry Bobbe
Jerry Bobbe's life has revolved around his passions, but its course has been shaped by his perfectionist drives and his determination to take charge of his own destiny. If you had asked the young Jerry 34 years ago where he expected to be today, he could have simply pointed at his former teacher and mentor Frank Miller, the esteemed principal cellist of the Chicago Symphony, regarded by many as the best in the business. Everything in Bobbe's background suggested a smooth transition to a similar career as principal cellist with one of the nation's symphony orchestras. He was first the rising teenaged star who had won a full scholarship to Chicago Musical College to study with controversial teacher Karl Fruh, had profited from intermittent study sessions with the great Leonard Rose, had played the Dvorak and Lalo Cello Concertos on local TV with the WGN Orchestra, and Bloch's "Schelomo" with the Chicago Civic Orchestra. He had served as principal cellist of the latter orchestra, and held the same position with the Chicago Chamber Orchestra. He had left Chicago to serve as Assistant Principal Cellist of the Milwaukee Symphony, and had then moved on to yet another Principal Cellist job with the Florida Orchestra.
But when Bobbe became frustrated with his musical progress, his life took a sharp turn off the expected path. As a teen he had nurtured a strong interest in early American copper coins. In 1972 he had discovered an under-explored corner of the coin realm-Provincial Token Coinage of Eighteenth Century England-- and the lure of a new passion was decisive. He walked away from the musical career he had been training for and plunged himself full-time into the world of rare and valuable coins. His talents in numismatics proved as rare as his musical skills, and he had soon carved out a successful career grading and trading coins, with his beloved cello now as a labor of love rather than professional preoccupation. 16 years after he abandoned the orchestral fast track, Bobbe was ready to be lured back into the world of professional performance, as a founding member of the iconoclastic trio St. Elvis. Throughout the ups and downs since that point, he has continued to juggle both careers. On the one hand are the hours he devotes to his cello students, and to practice and performance, including a decade as principal cellist of the Vancouver (WA) Symphony, which he capped off with a triumphant public performance of the Dvorak Concerto. On the other hand is his continuing presence in the world of coins, with Web sites devoted to their sale, and steady work in the delicate field of restoration, as well as regular appearances in lectures and seminars at professional conferences of the American Numismatic Association; he contributes to a monthly column for the ANA's monthly "Numismatist".
In his professional and private life he is the ever-insistent advocate, ready to launch into fierce diatribes against music teachers whose shoddy instruction leads to injury, against coin dealers who engage in theft and fraud, and against government leaders who do likewise. He is also the warm-hearted performer who will don the hat and moustache of Charlie Chaplin for a performance of the comic's music, and who donates his talents to the Children's Cancer Association and fills the halls of hospitals with the beauty of his cello's sound.
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Samuel Barber's music, or at least one piece of it, is now known to millions who otherwise boast only limited knowledge of 20th-century classics, thanks to the copycat tendencies of movie directors, who have used his String Quartet in b-minor which was a crossover hit long before "Platoon" spread the word to the film community. Arturo Toscanini conducted the lyrical lament in a radio broadcast in 1938, and ignited the first of many critical firestorms Barber's music was to attract. It is difficult at this distance to grasp how fierce the infighting was in the world of "serious" music during the decades when popular music was pushing it farther and farther toward the fringes of American life. The advocates of take-no-prisoners modernism were not pleased by the way Barber clung to such "old-fashioned" concepts as lyrical beauty and emotional expression, while nationalists lamented that this cultivated child of privilege, at home on both sides of the Atlantic, had neglected to carve out a distinctly "American" style. Nor were the times propitious for open discussion of Barber's personal life, which for over four decades centered on a relationship that began in the 1920s with the meeting of two teenagers at the Curtis Institute of Music. The man some Web sources still coyly call his "housemate," Gian Carlo Menotti, became the most successful composer of opera in mid-century America (His "Amahl and the Night Visitors" was a standard of holiday TV fare in my childhood, and was almost certainly the first opera many millions of us ever saw). In more enlightened times we would automatically place Menotti-Barber alongside Steiglitz-O'Keefe and Rivera-Kahlo in the pantheon of famous marriages joining great creative artists. Barber would in time win two Pulitzer Prizes, but would also suffer the public failure of his opera "Antony and Cleopatra" which opened the new Metropolitan Opera House in 1966, and the rupture of his domestic relationship, which broke apart in 1973. Nevertheless, when Barber died in 1981, Menotti was at his bedside.
The Sonata on this disk was written in 1932, during the first flood of youthful passion that would four years later result in the Quartet with its famous Adagio. Barber was a capable baritone singer, a skillful composer of songs, whose works often include private references, and the Opus 6 Sonata for Cello and Piano in c-minor sounds very much like the illustration of some personal crisis in the life of a composer who was still only 22 years old. The Allegro non Troppo first movement begins with an intense drama, which is set aside for a while by an eruption of sweetness, before the fireworks begin again. The second movement Adagio reverses the back-and forth structure, beginning with a slow and melancholy meditation by the cello, interrupted by an animated and enthusiastic episode dominated by piano, and at last reverting to the wistful elegance of the opening. (Its structure matches a pattern observers saw in his relationship with Menotti, where the reserved and introverted Barber would be pulled by the extroverted Italian into a whirlwind of social activity, only to tire of the hubbub and withdraw). The dense and stormy Allegro Appassionato finale is a reminder that Brahms was one of Barber's favorite composers.
Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959)
Self-taught musicians make life hard on the people who like to put composers in tidy little boxes. Heitor Villa-Lobos is a case in point. He is said to have picked up most of his musical knowledge by ear, listening to concerts in the family home. He was only twelve when his father suddenly died in 1899, but he was able to go to work at once playing in the pits of theaters or the new movie houses. Because young Heitor skipped the sort of formal training that sets most composers on a path they can either follow or reject, his trajectory is harder to plot. He picked up both the classical tradition and assorted folk styles in the same way: by listening to the music and playing it. His instruments were clarinet, guitar and cello, and his freelancing took him from the street music of Rio de Janeiro, to the orchestra of the city's opera house. Because he had the flexible approach to musical construction that practical musicians so often show, he has been treated as a "rebel" against the classical tradition, and because he sometimes incorporated Brazilian folk melodies in his work, he's been lumped in the grab-bag category of "nationalist" composers, who supposedly set themselves against European authority....unless, of course, you remember that he spent the 1920s in Paris, spent the 1930s in Brazil working on patriotic projects only because the country's authoritarian government wouldn't let him travel abroad, and as soon as he was allowed, resumed his international career, including a Hollywood soundtrack written not too long before his death in 1959. Villa-Lobos was clearly an eclectic musician, able to absorb more influences than most, but wary, as those with that sponge-like power must be, of letting his style slide too far in the direction of any one of his models. He was proud of his originality, determined to sound like no one else, but his own sound was sufficiently varied that it's not easy to find a "typical" composition. It's telling that the most famous of his compositions, The Bachianas Brazilianas, not only flaunts its East-meets-West parentage in the title, but the assorted movements of the piece feature a bewildering variety of instrumental combinations.
His Second Sonate for Cello and Piano, Opus 66, was written in 1916, before his move to Paris. He had married pianist Lucilia Guimarães four years earlier (the marriage would last nearly a quarter century) and was in the first years of publishing his music, often premiering it in chamber music concerts. So, even though there are those who insist that 1916 was the year of his great break with Europe (because of two tone poems featuring native themes Villa-Lobos composed, but did not perform, that year) the Sonate for Cello featured no Brazilian folk elements at all. Maurice Hinson insists "It is built on solid traditional structures." Perhaps, but to my ear the harmony of the first movement's passing tones would place Villa-Lobos closer to the avant-garde than to the stuffier traditionalists. There are moments of sophisticated salon music in the Andante Cantabile second movement that make it easy to understand why he responded to Satie's work when introduced to it the following year by a visiting Darius Milhaud. If Villa-Lobos played the cello part with his wife on piano you would guess that they were well-matched in their passion, and Lucilia must have been a whirlwind performer; note the intense, percussive attacks of the third movement and the way in the final movement the piano dances feverishly around a cello line that alternately roars and beseeches. (DAVE: note: tilde over second "a" in Guimaraes)
Robert Muczynski (1929-) If you look at the symphony halls and opera houses it's easy to see the 20th century as a time when audiences and composers lost touch with one another. A century that began with audiences filling halls to hear the latest creations of Puccini or Mahler, ended with a standard repertoire utterly dominated by music from the 19th-century and earlier. But if you focus, not on the big institutions, but on compositions for smaller groups of players, you see a different trend. Several of the most successful composers of the century, including Bartok and Shostakovich, made their greatest contributions in the field of chamber music, and on a given night the average touring quartet will devote a third of its music, very often the most applauded part of the program, to works from the 20th-century. Composers of solo or small-group works are constrained by the need to provide players with music they can really care about, and as so often happens in art, the restriction of options and a focus on performers' needs can lead to an upsurge in inspiration. This trend has especially shaped the career of Robert Muczynski, whose music has been described by critic Walter Simmons as noteworthy for "an avoidance of pretense or grandiosity of any kind." Born to Polish-American parents in 1929, the composer's talent was recognized early, and he entered De Paul University as a piano major in 1947, completing his BA in 1950 and his MA in 1952. Before the decade was over he had composed and performed a Piano Concerto for the Louisville Orchestra, and had made his New York debut as a pianist at at Carnegie Recital Hall, with a program devoted entirely to his own music. In the 19th-century that would have been the signal for a touring career, but the age of Liszt, when a pianist/composer could attain rock star status was long past. Muczynski took the academic path to solvency. In 1956 he became head of the piano program at Loras College, leaving after three years to serve as composer-in-residence in the Oakland school district, funded by the Ford Foundation, and then a faculty position at the University of Arizona, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. His greatest international success came in 1961, when his Sonata for Flute won a competition in Nice and came to the attention of the preeminent flutist of the day, Jean-Pierre Rampal. The French flutist, who toured steadily for decades, made the Muczynski Sonata a regular part of his repertoire. Since then Muczynski has won a devoted following for his compositions for solo piano or chamber group. His Opus 26 Sonata for Cello and Piano, published in 1970, shows why. From beginning to end the sonata crackles with dramatic action. The opening Theme and Variations builds mounting tension from the edgy cello theme that begins it, and the suspenseful Scherzo that follows pulls the listener deeper into the drama, which mounts still further after the Andante start of the third movement, and culminates in the infectious energy of the driving final Allegro con spirito.
