Review: Trio Shines in Camerata Pacifica's All-French Season Opener

September 19, 2024, 12:20 AM · Cool, jasmine-scented night air and a full "Harvest supermoon" made it truly feel like fall on Tuesday, as I walked through the the Huntington Museum and Gardens entrance to the first chamber concert series of the 2024-25 season for Camerata Pacifica, in San Marino, Calif.

Ahh, the 2024-25 season begins, here and everywhere!

I've come to expect an extraordinarily high level of music-making from Camerata Pacifica, and that's exactly what this program of early 20th-century French works delivered, featuring New York-based Taiwanese violinist Paul Huang, Colombian cellist Santiago Cañón-Valencia and Swiss-born American pianist Gilles Vonsattel.

It was a relatively short program - about 75 minutes, and perfectly delightful, with two works by Maurice Ravel - the Sonata for Violin and Cello (1920-22) as well as his earlier Trio for Piano, Violin and Cello, with Claude Debussy's 1907 piano piece "Images," Series II sandwiched between.

Ravel's Sonata for Violin and Cello features those instruments alone, without piano accompaniment, and during the first movement Huang and Cañón-Valencia brought out its playful character, leaning into its frequent rhythmic volleying. The second movement ("Très vif") featured rapid pizzicato punctuated by dissonant chords, as well as plenty of other tricks - double stops and harmonics. It was at once off-balance and completely precise, an intricate rhythmic choreography that Huang and Cañón-Valencia played with ease and infectious enjoyment. The program notes said that Ravel "seems to have wanted both the violin and cello to produce similar tone colors," and this rang true, with the instruments often in the same register, making for some very high cello playing, which Cañón-Valencia executed expertly.

Violinist Paul Huang and cellist Santiago Cañón-Valencia. Photo courtesy of Camerata Pacifica.

For the second piece, Vonsattel took to the piano for Debussy's three-movement "Images pour Piano Book II," providing a contrast from the somewhat more thorny Ravel. As Camerata Pacifica Artistic Director Adrian Spence had said from the stage before the performance, Debussy didn't like to be called an Impressionist, "but there is a reason we refer to his music as Impressionist - the light is changing all the time."

This actually happened literally during the concert - at first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me but the stage lighting, which began in deep blue, started shifting at some point during the first movement, "Cloches à travers les feuilles" or "Bells Heard Through the Trees," darkening around Vonsattel until he almost seemed to glow, his moving hands reflecting off the shiny Steinway piano as if it were a mirror.

Before the concert, Spence had challenged the audience (a full audience, by the way) to pretend we could paint any colors with our hands during the Debussy. "What would you paint, listening to this music? What does your eye hear, and how would you color that?"

I'm no synaesthete - I don't automatically associate music with colors. It is words that come to me, and I tend to write them down in a notebook. However, as we became completely enveloped in darkness during this piece, I actually had to stop my pen, as I could no longer see my notebook! I let the sound wash over me, as Spence had directed, and watched the colors. By the final movement, the music became shimmery, with more movement. To me it felt like a sunrise, but when I later looked at the title (which translated to "The Golden Fish,") I could also see that "shimmering" as something watery. The light, which had turned to a bright gold - could have been the sunshine, or the fish. In Vonsattel's hands, the music could feel static in one moment and full of movement in the next, it was very picturesque.

Huang and Cañón-Valencia joined Vonsattel for the final piece of the evening: Ravel's Piano Trio in A minor.

Paul Huang, Gilles Vonsattel, Santiago Canon-Valencia

Violinist Paul Huang, pianist Gilles Vonsattel, and cellist Santiago Canon-Valencia. Photo courtesy of Camerata Pacifica.

The piece opened with the violin and cello tracing a melody in perfect octaves, and with Huang and Cañón-Valencia, "perfect" was certainly the correct word. One tends to notice intonation only when it is off, but these two were conspicuously and infallibly on, all evening. One of my favorite moments in the piece was in the fourth movement, when these three musicians brought the music down to nearly nothing - silence, stillness, sleep, seeming finality. But then it wasn't - they made it bloom, coming back to life, the pulse returning, the music moving again with lilting energy. The music ascended, with trills in the strings, rolling piano chords, and huge sound - it was a brilliant ending for an excellent concert.

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There are two more performances of this concert program - one on Thursday at Colburn and another Friday in Santa Barbara. And Camerata Pacifica has plenty in store for the rest of the season, with a concert series each month, bringing in best-of-the-best musicians from around the globe to southern California. Click here to check out their concerts for the season.

After the concert: Violinist.com editor Laurie Niles and violinist Paul Huang.

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