Kallos Creates A Feast For The Ears

Min Young Kang, founder and artistic director of Kallos Chamber Music Series, smiled at the full house in the ballroom of the New Haven Lawn Club before Wednesday night’s concert began. ​“It always feels so great to come back here to share music with such a welcoming and warm audience like you,” she said. ​“Every single one of you plays a huge role in our performance, because we feed off our audiences.”

The reference to food was appropriate, because in this concert — titled ​“Sounds of Nature” — a quintet of Kate Arndt on violin, Bridget Kibbey on harp, Sooyun Kim on flute, Christine J. Lee on cello, and Tanner Menees on viola played works by Marcel Tournier, Albert Roussel, Claude Debussy, and Jean Françaix that, in many ways, felt like a well-crafted meal, from appetizer to dessert, with a wide variety of rich flavors in between.

The program, Kang said, focused on music that drew its inspiration from the sounds of early 20th-century rural France. Hearing music drawn from the natural soundtrack of the countryside, she suggested, was akin to visiting natural places. ​“We are obviously living in a much more industrialized world,” she said, and sometimes ​“we need to get away” into nature. 

Reconnecting with nature could also mean reconnecting with the past. ​“I grew up in a big city, but my grandparents lived in a small, rural town in Korea, surrounded by mountains,” Kang said. She still had ​“that childhood memory. Running through the woods, going on an adventure, left me so much to be thankful for. It was a great joy to explore nature as a young kid.” 

Quoting Shakespeare, she said ​“the earth has music for those who listen. Like him, lots of composers found their inspiration in nature.” One of those was Claude Debussy, who said that ​“music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes. So nature and music and intimately connected.” In the night’s second allusion to food, she added, ​“I hope you can taste that connection tonight.”

Before the program began, Kim gave some context for the music the audience was about to hear, noting that early 20th-century French composers drew from an impressionistic style parallel to the movement in painting. They created ​“soundscapes, painting a sonic landscape.” The audience would be able to hear wind, water, birds, and maybe even stars. ​“In music you can see and almost hear the stars,” she said. 

She also mentioned that the composers whose work they were playing tonight wrote music for what were then new versions of old instruments: the flute and harp. Holding up her own flute, she said, ​“before 1900 flutes did not look anything like this.” Changes in the flute inspired composers at the time ​“to write these amazing pieces.”

Marcel Tournier’s Suite op. 34 for flute, harp, violin, viola and cello opened with gently pulsing chords from the strings, with the flute sighing over the top of them. The harp’s figures grounded everything. In its opening passages it made the argument for a French sound, one that employed textures and shifting tonalities to build its emotions. The second movement began with a pastoral sound that the viola imbued with a sense of urgency that soon spread to the other instruments, only to calm and subside as the strings worked toward the top of their registers. The third movement was a measured affair, with a melody shared first by flute and violin, then viola and cello. Again, Tournier used the harp as an anchor. In the bright fourth movement, it’s possible that the audience caught a glimpse of the limitations of Tournier’s compositional abilities, as he tasked the harp with perhaps a few too many glissandi. The players’ stellar performance, however, kept the composer’s reliance on that cliche from going stale. Their energy pulled laughs of delight from the audience, which burst into applause at the end of the piece.

Kibbey then picked up where Kim left off, describing how the modern harp came about thanks to a competition to make a new harp ​“because Debussy and Ravel wanted to use it in a chromatic harmony fashion that was becoming more in vogue.” The new harp had pedals that allowed the instrument to move off on a single seven-tone scale to be able to play all twelve tones in Western music, allowing composers to write more harmonically sophisticated compositions for it. One was Albert Roussels who, like his contemporaries, ​“likes layering a lot,” passing lines from instrument to instrument. ​“But he also has a detachment from it,” Kibbey added. ​“It’s not overly emotional. It’s more restrained,” in a more neo-classicist mode. So in the mixing of the older and newer, she said, ​“two worlds collide.”

If the Tournier had been the appetizer, easing the audience’s ears into the sound of this series of composers, the Roussel was a piece with more sustenance. Its first movement was more harmonically dense, its textures more intricate, than anything in the Tournier. Here the musicians’ ensemble playing shone, as they tore into the music and conveyed the way the ideas bounced from instrument to instrument with utter clarity. The second movement started on an austere, uneasy chord, the flute’s melody moving through it trailing a little anxiety, held down by a plucked heartbeat from the cello. By the end of the movement, the instruments had switched roles, letting the cello take on an aching melody. The final, fleet third movement came on like trouble, led by a pleasantly aggressive viola. The composer’s deft use of harp and plucked strings created plenty of velocity before turning to a searching section that once again showcased the musicians’ facility with maintaining atmosphere while revealing the throughlines that carried the lead voice from one instrument to the next.

After a brief intermission, Menees introduced the Debussy portion of the program, explaining that the piece ​“Syrinx,” for solo flute, was in effect diving into the history of the instrument by retelling a story about Pan, the Greek deity who ​“was one of the most notorious flutists in history,” he joked. The story of Syrinx is the story of Pan creating the flute that bears his name. The solo flute piece, he said, would then ​“melt seamlessly in the Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp.” He noted the strangeness of Debussy calling it a sonata ​“because a sonata usually refers to a formal compositional practice” of repeating certain segments in a certain order. Instead Debussy opted for a more ​“freeform” approach in which the instruments ​“interweave and interlock. Sometimes we’re all playing really antithetical music to each other and sometimes we’re in these beautiful unisons.” Debussy ​“crafts all these colors from just the three instruments.”

Though the ensemble was smaller for this portion of the program — a clever way to vary the texture of the concert overall — the Debussy pieces could be understood as the concert’s main course. With ​“Syrinx,” the flute’s melody moved with determination and unpredictability. With the harp as a bridge, the piece indeed dropped into the sonata without a hitch, as flute and viola passed the melody like a baton. The mood moved from severe to lush in a matter of seconds, then took off in a galloping phrase. The musicians navigated this and the following complex interplay among the instruments with ease. In the second movement, an energetic passing around of melody gave way to a sweeping unison that then morphed into the free-form exploration of ideas that Menees had promised. It felt as fickle, and in another dependably changeable, as a breeze. The third movement was off like a shot, featuring Debussy’s most challenging writing — and the musicians’ most aggressive playing — yet. At its conclusion, the pat return to obvious tonality, given what had come before, felt almost sarcastic. In presenting a little-played work by an acclaimed composer, Kallos allowed for a rediscovery of why Debussy’s music has lasted.

To introduce the final piece, Lee noted that ​“we’ve been talking about French music and nature, but we haven’t spoken about wine.” She likened the Françaix to that beverage, describing it as ​“joyful” and ​“sparkling.… I would like to dedicate this piece to a celebration of life.”

Lee’s characterization of the Françaix, especially after the Debussy, was welcome, for the piece was short and sweet. The first movement revolved around a melody as simple as a folk song. The second movement partook of some textural frenzy, but was more playful than searching. The third movement’s overall effect was of sweetness and comfort. In the fourth movement, however, at the very end, all five musicians got a chance to dig into their instruments as the previous trio had been able to do. They brought more energy to the Françaix than it required, and in doing so, made the piece better. Like any good glass of wine, it had a strong finish.

The Kallos Chamber Music Series continues on April 26 at the New Haven Lawn Club. Visit the series’s website for tickets and more information.