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Second Violins Artur Girsky and Natasha Bazhanov will play together in Steve Reich's Different Trains, joined by PONCHO Principal Viola Susan Gulkis Assadi and Cello Walter Gray. Performing in the beginning half of this Chamber Series program is First Violin Jeannie Wells Yablonsky and Cello Roberta Hansen Downey joined by pianist Lisa Lewis (January 10). Photo by James Holt.

Carlos Simon is currently Composer-in-Residence at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and writes for orchestra, film and various chamber ensembles. Last year, Requiem for the Enslaved was released on Decca, and Profiles (his orchestral meditation on the renowned collagist Romare Bearden) was premiered by the New York Philharmonic.  

Composed in 2015 for violin, cello and piano, be still and know for Piano Trio was inspired by Oprah Winfrey’s valedictory testimony at the conclusion of her long-running program in 2011: “I have felt the presence of God my whole life. Even when I didn’t have a name for it, I could feel the voice bigger than myself speaking to me, and all of us have that same voice. Be still and know it.” 

This spiritual rumination opens with gently chiming chords. As the piano tolls a descending chord progression in the bass, the strings hover as if windswept and wounded, circling with bleak, sustained tones. Amidst this somber terrain, bright rippling arpeggios emerge from the piano. In response, the violin and cello embark on a duet whose bittersweet passages grow confident enough to coax a hopeful benediction from the piano. 

“YOUNG WOMAN PLAYS VIOLA” reads the seemingly astonished, all-caps headline praising a 1918 recital by cellist May Mukle and Rebecca Clarke (1886–1979), “who played the viola, an unusual instrument in solo or duet.” The British-American violist was never shy about her instrument or prodigious talent. Yet she was reluctant to admit composing not one, but two pieces for that recital; fearing embarrassment, she self-consciously credited one to a fictitious “Anthony Trent.” 

Nevertheless, Clarke was a trailblazer. In 1912, she was one of six women to augment the Queen’s Hall Orchestra in London; 66 years later, she confided to an interviewer that “the men in the orchestra were disgusted, but then they were friendly” after Clarke and her cohorts proved their musicianship. A dauntless, well-travelled performer, Clarke frequently collaborated with cellist Pablo Casals and shared the stage with Ravel (and read his fortune with Tarot cards afterwards). She dined with Bartók (“I always found him charming”) and counted Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst and William Walton as friends. 

Clarke’s prizewinning Viola Sonata (1919) brought her fleeting fame as a composer. Unfortunately, she lived in an era when a woman who composed was regarded as a novelty, if not an aberration. Her demure, dignified avoidance of self-promotion — “I never used to talk about my work” — as well as her dedication to concertizing paired with a loving, late-in-life marriage relegated her compositions to obscurity. In 1976, a chance radio interview stirred interest in Clarke, whose Piano Trio for violin, cello and piano (1921) enjoyed a triumphant revival over a half-century later. 

Clarke’s musical language — at times dissonant, rhythmically tumultuous and spookily ethereal — builds an enrapturing sonic world. Rather than rely on instrumental effects or the jarring overuse of (what were then) avant-garde techniques, Clarke weaves the Trio together with two key motifs. 

First, a jolting five-note cannonade launches the tempestuous Moderato ma appassionato and permeates the entire movement. This off-kilter volley reappears in the middle Andante molto semplice in an elongated form atop a bed of serenely flowing triplets and also in the culmination of the closing Allegro vigoroso. The second motif is heard first as rising pianissimo chords on the piano. Mournful and misterioso, this passage resembles a military bugle call and resurfaces at the beginning of the second movement; later, it haunts and undergirds a grand crescendo in the finale. Clarke’s continual reshaping of these motifs enables her to introduce additional melodic ideas while retaining a sense of unity in the Piano Trio. 

The title of Different Trains refers to two sets of train rides: those Steve Reich took as a child of divorce from New York to Los Angeles between 1939 and 1942, which he recalled as “exciting and glamorous at the time.” And what the composer, imagining an alternate childhood in Europe during the Holocaust, observed after finishing the piece in 1988: “As a Jew, I would have had to ride on very different trains.” 

Unlike music that serves as a memorial or depicts historical events years or decades later, Different Trains offers multiple, often oblique views through the voices of those who were there: Virginia, the governess who chaperoned Reich as a child; Lawrence Davis, a black Pullman porter who worked the same cross-country trains ridden by Reich; and three Holocaust survivors — Rachella, Paul and Rachel — all about Reich’s age, who rode on those “very different trains.” 

Different Trains begins with the ding-ding-ding of a train crossing signal and the hypnotic 16th-note patterns of a pre-recorded string quartet. A hulking train blast belches once, and again sounds the E note followed by F then G; this improbable, almost surreal transposition foreshadows the stuttering and fragmented voices in each movement.  

Virginia and Mr. Davis set the scene in America - Before the war––, stating geographical locations of the train and enunciating the year. This immediate audibility of the compositional process is a hallmark of Reich’s music. Throughout Different Trains, one instrument or several instruments introduce a melodic figure and a change in tempo followed by a new vocal fragment. We quickly become familiar, if not intimate, with these voices through repetition. Hearing, then re-hearing, shifts our factual and semantic knowledge towards the evocation of ideas, images and memories. 

Flowing without interruption into Europe - During the war—, an air raid siren careens in tandem with Holocaust survivors telling us “The Germans walked in” and other chilling memories. The train blasts jump an octave higher, hinting at squealing brakes and eventually, human screams.  

In After the war, Mr. Davis reflects on the trains of yore, “but today they’re all gone,” an ironic allusion to those who perished in the camps and the ever-dwindling number of Holocaust survivors today. Finally, tender music accompanies Rachella remembering a doomed girl “who had a beautiful voice,” singing for a pack of delighted Nazis. That nameless singer was meant to be silenced forever, yet a poetic fragment of that moment survives in Rachella’s — and perhaps our own — memories. 

Christopher DeLaurenti © 2023