Kallos Finds The Sound For The Times

Without warning, pianist Min Young Kang laid into the keys to declare the opening figure to Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G minor. The players in the Ulysses Quartet — sharing the stage with her at First Presbyterian Church on Whitney Avenue Tuesday evening — followed with choral declarations of their own. Ideas flowed one into the other from there, passed from instrument to instrument until it all came together in a sweeping, heroic theme that fell into an aching fugue.

It was one of many stunning, emotional moments Tuesday night, which marked the Kallos Chamber Music Series​‘s opening performance of its 2021 – 22 season, titled ​“When Beauty Triumphs.” For this concert, pianist — and Kallos founder and executive director — Min Young Kang teamed up with the Ulysses Quartet (Christina Bouey and Rhiannon Banerdt on violin, Colin Brookes on viola, and Grace Ho on cello) for an ambitious program that succeeded, well, triumphantly, as evidenced by the rapturous applause from the fully masked and vaccinated audience. (Proof of vaccination was required for entry.)

“It has been 19 months since we were here,” said Kang, a smile on her face, at the beginning of the concert. ​“It’s so wonderful to be back.” She noted that Kallos had found ways to stay active during the shutdown. ​“We were thankfully able to present a virtual performance, but we missed you so much.”

For the chamber music series’s first evening back, Kang said, ​“I wanted to present a concert that resonated with our lives since the Covid-19 breakout.” She turned to Ludwig von Beethoven’s late string quartets, Gustav Mahler’s lieder, Dmitri Shostakovich’s chamber music, and the work of current classical composing star Jessie Montgomery. ​“Each piece was conceived from a place of immense hardship,” she said. Each piece also represented ​“the composers’ intimate voyage to beauty and triumph.” (Check out the video above for a sneak preview Kallos made for the concert.)

Kang explained that Jessie Montgomery’s ​“Peace for Violin and Piano,” which opened the program, ​“was written in the middle of lockdown.” As Montgomery herself wrote at the time of composition, ​“I was going to call this ​‘Melancholy’ instead of ​‘Peace,’ but I didn’t want to be a downer for the people. I’m struggling during quarantine to define what actually brings me joy. And I’m at a stage of making peace with sadness as it comes and goes like any other emotion. I’m learning to observe sadness for the first time not as a negative emotion, but as a necessary dynamic to the human experience.”

As Kang laid out the opening figures to the piano part — a hesitant phrase that tripped over itself — Bouey brought in her part with passion from the first note. Kang’s piano then provided a shifting, anxious texture to the violin’s sadness. The short piece built to a moment of tumult, then ended on a note of uncertainty that felt all too earned, and all too appropriate for the times we live in.

As the full Ulysses Quartet set up for the next piece, Brookes explained that Shostakovich was a ​“household name” to him growing up, and was also Ho’s favorite composer. ​“No pressure,” he joked. The Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57, written in 1940, came in the middle of Shostakovich’s career; it was believed that he wrote it in order to have a part for himself as a pianist in one of his string quartets. The first movement, Brookes said, contained a fugue that, in his opinion, was ​“one of the most beautiful fugues ever written.” He also reported that, when Shostakovich first played it for Soviet audiences with a string quartet, at the end of the final movement, ​“the audience went completely wild and requested immediate encores.”

As the musicians moved through the piece, it was easy to see why. Shostakovich was a composer who piled nearly every emotion into most of his compositions, from rapture to deep despair, with plenty of humor and anxiety in between. It gave Kang and the Ulysses Quartet much to do, and much to work with. They were up to it, attacking the third movement with an energy that made the music exuberant and occasionally comic; the jokes landed. The fourth movement they interpreted with a keen austerity that never broke even as they made the piece breathe. In the finale, they easily handled the main theme’s unbridled joy and its half-funny, half-desperate detonation, and were rewarded with perhaps the most intense applause of the evening.

The concert’s second half opened with two short lieder from Mahler, played by Kang and Ho on cello. Ho explained that the first song, ​“If You Love for Beauty,” was written when Mahler had just married, and was full of the delight of new love. The second song — ​“I Am Lost to the World” — was its ​“opposite.” The words were from the poet Friedrich Ruckert, and the program notes provided both the original German and an English translation. With Ho’s cello, however, no words were necessary. She and Yang interpreted both songs in full romantic mode, suggesting that these polar opposite emotion states were united in the intensity of their emotions. Neither being deeply in love nor being utterly alone, perhaps, could be fully understood by itself; each one needed the other.

The Ulysses Quartet finished the concert with Beethoven’s String Quartet no. 14 in C‑sharp minor, Op. 131. ​“It is a really meaningful piece to us,” Banerdt said. It was ​“one of the last pieces he wrote in his life”; in failing health and having already had a brush with death, it’s reasonable to speculate that ​“he was contemplating his own mortality.” In response, ​“he totally tossed aside all of the conventions he had used” in so many previous compositions. String quartets are usually constructed in four movements; Op. 131 had seven, with no break in between them. Banerdt described the piece as having ​“some of the darkest, most painful” passages of music she had ever played — and also ​“some of the brightest, most tender, and most spiritual.”

The quartet deftly captured the piece’s wild mood swings with exquisite, sometimes hairpin dynamic control. The music conveyed a complex emotional state. At times the musical phrases on all the instruments breathed as one. Other times, the instruments bounced off one another or seemed to run into opposite corners. Still other times, half of the quartet seemed to convey glee while the other half made a bed of nervousness. It coursed from feeling to feeling, wrenching and lyrical, funereal and celebratory. Taken as a whole, the performance was just as Kang had hoped — resonant with the time, and offering understanding, catharsis, and consolation.

Visit the Kallos Chamber Music Series website for information on its full 2021 – 22 season.