Wednesday’s lunchtime concert at Heliconian Hall; part of Toronto Summer Music, featured two pieces of chamber music by Beethoven and Shostakovich. The first was the third movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op.132. It was played by Justin Saulnier, Ashley Tsai, Bill Ko and Claire Park. It’s an unusual movement, especially taken out of context. It intersperses intricate, very slow passages where phrases are passed between the players without too much in the way of obvious clues for where the music is going. It’s profound and quite ethereal. These sections arr interwoven with livelier sections where the “cues” are more obvious. I would think it’s difficult to get just right at the best of times and for what amounts to a “scratch” quartet to handle it as well as they did is admirable. It feels like the sort of music that one needs to play with the same colleagues for twenty years! Incidentally, the same team is playing all four movements of this work tomorrow at noon.

The second piece was the incredibly intense Shostakovich Piano Trio No.2 in E minor, Op. 67. This piece dates from 1944 when news of the Nazi death camps was becoming known in the USSR. Shostakovich pours into it all his hate of war and all it brings. The first movement starts slow and quietly and very high on cello with tension building, then the violin picks up the melody and then the piano. There are struck strings and it gets busy and loud and extremely virtuosic. It’s followed by an Allegro con brio which is really fast and demanding on the players.. The third movement; marked Largo, starts with very loud, slow, boomy piano before the violin plays a sort of lament with cello joining in while the piano drops back to a sparse background. Which all leads to the final wild movement where the composer takes themes from Jewish folk music and moulds them into a fast, furious and intense “Dance of Death” before finishing off in a somewhat more lyrical but still abrasive vein. Fantastic playing from Yubin Kim, Jiahe Zhang and Hans Chan.