For John Harbison’s 2003 Piano Trio No. 2, Levin and Mark were joined at the piano by Thompson’s (and Harbison’s) MIT colleague David Deveau. Both piece and performance were temperamental contrasts to the Schubert, everything projected outward, even the body language more extroverted (especially from Deveau, his theatrical physicality matching his incisive playing).
Harbison’s program note claimed a connection with Haydn’s style, but the music is heavy with baggage picked up on its journey back to Haydn’s time - the opening movements carry the perfume of Romanticism, a scherzo burst provides plenty of early-modernist motions to go through, while the finale opts for a gnomic expressionism, hollow plucks and the rough buzz of paper on the piano’s strings. The drama broods, but the dramatic energy is always pushed to the fore, the music working out its trials on a public stage.
The A-major, Op. 26 Piano Quartet of Johannes Brahms, featuring all four players, was, at least on the surface, more hospitable chamber-music comforts, but, like Haydn, its geniality is hardly naive. The group’s sound - a dark, Rembrandt-like varnish - suited the rhetoric, in which even the most seemingly clear-cut statements tend to blur into shadow and storm. (Thompson and Mark were particularly well-matched in this, their urgency heightened by expressive reticence.)
After the Harbison, I overheard one concertgoer assure another that the Brahms would be “easier’’; maybe, but only if you’re in the habit of taking happy endings for granted. Brahms earns his sun by lasting through the night.
BOSTON CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY
Marcus Thompson, artistic director
At: Sanders Theatre, Harvard University, Sunday
