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Photos courtesy of the Kallos Chamber Music Series.
It was the cello, a low-bellied hum from the front seats, that made the room fall to a hush. Overhead, chandeliers gave off a soft glow, doing their best to feel like candlelight. Rain pelted the windows and pooled on the ground outside. Cello breathed, and violin answered from the back of the room, haunting and ethereal. In the audience, listeners leaned forward, and placed their half-filled wine glasses in their laps.
Sound traversed genres, traditions and centuries last Wednesday night, as the Kallos Chamber Music Series returned to the New Haven Lawn Club for the third concert of its 2024-25 season. Titled "Timeless Threads: Antique to Modern," the night's program featured music from the 11th century to the present, with selections from Hildegard von Bingen, John Cage, Marc Mellits, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
It included musicians Graeme Steele Johnson on clarinet; Anna Lee and Isabelle Ai Durrenberger on violin; Tanner Menees on viola and Joshua Halpern on cello. Kallos Founder and Director Minyoung Kang, who is normally at the piano, buzzed eagerly around the room, shimmering in a floral, sequinned dress that banished the cold and wet night outside.
"Thank you for your commitment to keeping classical music alive," she said before handing it over to the musicians, who were placed across the building's large, chandelier-lit ballroom as conversation rolled to a slow stop around them.
But the label of "classical," at least as it is understood in the mainstream, didn't seem adequate for the sheer breadth of Wednesday's concert. In von Bingen's "O Virtus Sapientiae," arranged for strings and woodwind by Marianne Pfau, instruments entered one by one, so slow and methodical it felt as if they were thick, bright ribbons of sound, rolling slowly towards each other.
In a semicircle of four chairs, Halpern sat alone, the cello creating a low, persistent drone that became the foundation of the chant. Around him, it took a moment to locate the other musicians: they stood positioned at all corners of the room, slowly making their way to the same space as they played. At one spot, Lee leaned in tenderly to her violin, her whole body moving forward with the instrument. At another, Menees took up the chant, the viola weaving upward towards the other strings. Every so often, Halpern would look up expectantly, then return to the sound, wonder written all over his face.
As musicians began to move towards each other, it was as if the instruments were speaking amongst themselves, full of the awe and reverie that von Bingen—a twelfth-century Benedictine abbess who wrote and composed during her lifetime—so clearly could feel in her bones. When they finished, a round, thick silence filled the room for a few moments, as if listeners were still suspended in her spell. Then it broke, giving way to thunderous applause.
So too as the program flowed from Cage to Mozart to Mellits, who together draw on centuries of music history and tradition. In Mozart's "Theme and Variations Sonata in A Major, K. 331," (arranged for clarinet by Johnson, in honor of David Shifrin's 70th birthday), strings and clarinet danced around each other, picking up a common melodic thread as sound bloomed over the room. Where there had once been piano, Johnson's clarinet dipped in and out of strings, its voice at once full and whimsical, like there was a joke at the edge of the work.
"It transforms music for a solitary pianist into something that can be shared among friends," said Johnson, who studied with Shifrin and Ricardo Morales during his time at the Yale School of Music. And it did: throughout the piece, musicians often looked expectantly to each other, conversing in a series of long, soft-eyed glances, scrunched and knitted brows, and pursed lips that gave way to wide, open and relieved smiles.
If the quintet was on a journey through space and time, the audience could feel it by now. So it was not a surprise when musicians jumped back into the present, with Mellits' "Discrete Structures for Clarinet Quintet," and left the room slack-jawed and astounded (if von Bingen is talented at transcribing the divine, Mellits perhaps has a knack for conveying the divine among us). A graduate of the Yale School of Music—he lived over Modern Apizza when he was a student in New Haven—Mellits composed the work just last year.
In the work, Mellits has stitched together a series of short, sometimes startling musical vignettes, weaving them into a vibrant, cohesive whole. As musicians began Wednesday, the clarinet led the way, its voice strong and vivid. At first, it was steady, like the crepuscular whisper of morning. Beneath it, strings eased into the piece, so mellow they could have melted into the floor. They were not languid for long: less than a minute later, they were sharp and propulsive, building a foundation that Johnson's clarinet could float on top of.
"It [Mellits] kind of explodes the traditional classical music formula where you bury this piece of [new] music in the middle of the program because you're scared that it will offend," Johnson said. "In both Mozart and Mellits, there's a sense of the music being both fresh and familiar."
And it was. The structures enveloped the audience, sometimes soft and spare enough that a listener could hear the rain outside. At one point, they were so certain it felt almost mechanical, violin doing double duty as the metronome. Seconds later, the work had cracked itself open, and it felt like a stream was running right through the concert venue, the waters jumping with fish. Another, and it seemed as though strings and clarinet were chasing their musical tails.
It set the stage for a second half of jumping across centuries and countries, this time from the U.S. to the U.K. to Europe. Describing Coleridge-Taylor's life and work before "Clarinet Quintet in F sharp minor," Halpern gushed about the Black British composer, his hands dancing through the air as he described his early beginnings, late exploration of his Black identity, and a career that ended prematurely in 1912. Following the composer's death at just 37 years old, Coleridge-Taylor's "The Song of Hiawatha" cantatas were performed each year after his death through the second World War.
When Halpern first heard his clarinet quintet, "I could not believe I had been sleeping on this piece," he said to a smattering of good-natured laughs. Even more astounding, the composition came when the composer was just 20 years old—before he had begun probing what it meant to be Black and British, before the "The Song of Hiawatha" trilogy of cantatas, before meeting writers and thinkers that included Paul Laurence Dunbar and W.E.B. DuBois.
By the end of the night, no one in the audience was sleeping on it either (as a sort of curator, Kang is adamant about educating her audience, and often manages to do so while delivering a hefty and needed dose of joy). As strings played Johnson in, the clarinet drifted above and through the sound, seeming to pull the violins up with it as it soared. Right out the gate, the piece felt both passionate and almost honeyed, agreeable, pulling slowly, languorously back before letting it build to the finale.
There is good news for fans of the series, Kang reminded the audience when applause had subsided (the quintet also returned for an encore, attendees pausing before they reached for their umbrellas and still-damp coats). Normally, Kallos is able to fit four concerts into a season. For the first time this year, there will be a fifth, featuring Kang alongside cellist Paul Watkins, on April 9. More information on that is here.
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