Tashi reunion celebrates Messiaen centenary
The nostalgia wave currently gripping popular music seems to have left classical music largely untouched. Whereas thousands of fans will seemingly pay any price to hear a reunion concert of the Eagles or Police, you rarely hear someone pledging to liquidate their kids' college funds if they could just hear the original lineup of, say, the Cleveland Quartet.
Nevertheless, one of the most highly anticipated concerts of the season is tonight's reunion of Tashi, an ensemble formed in 1973 by pianist Peter Serkin, violinist Ida Kavafian, cellist Fred Sherry, and clarinetist Richard Stoltzman. The group, which plays a free concert at Harvard's Paine Hall, has not played together in almost 30 years. (It will also perform this summer at Tanglewood.)
So what drew these four stellar musicians together again?
According to Stoltzman, it was the composer who brought them together in the first place: Olivier Messiaen, whose centenary is this year. Back in the early '70s, Serkin was looking for colleagues to join him in exploring the French composer's "Quartet for the End of Time," music that was hardly played at the time. In it they found not only a visionary piece of mystical beauty but a work that spoke to them at a deep level.
"As a bunch of young people, I think we had - and still hopefully have - certain ideals and reasons why we were in music," says the clarinetist, by phone from his home north of Boston. "And this piece allowed us to express those ideals of devotion to the score and of compromise and communication among the other members of the ensemble to achieve something greater than themselves."
The initial idea wasn't to form a group, per se. They just wanted to delve into Messiaen's piece, which they did intermittently for nine months. Little by little, the work's hypnotically slow tempos and intimations of eternity began to change the way they thought about music.
"You give up expectations about where it's going," Stoltzman explains. "Is this supposed to lead to some sort of climax? I don't know. Is it developing into anything? I don't know. What do I do? I listen. And that was a wonderful discovery for us - this aspect of not expecting anything, just listening and letting the music happen."
Public performance was an afterthought, so much so that at their first concert - in March 1973, at the New School in New York - they hadn't even bothered to come up with a name. They played music by Mozart, Stravinsky, Webern, and, of course, Messiaen. The buzz among the crowd wasn't just for their musical chops or the unfamiliar fare, but also for the fact that they eschewed concert garb and dressed casually. Some of the squares were offended, others were titillated.
"A few little starstruck ladies came backstage and told us, 'You should call yourselves the Flower Children,' " Stoltzman remembers, laughing. "They were delighted by the fact that Peter had his Tibetan jacket and ponytail, and I had a headband on, and Ida had some kind of quilt skirt. Somebody probably had an Om necklace."
"But I believe that we sort of did it unaffectedly," he continues. He recalls the reaction they got on their second visit to a Midwestern city. "People came back afterward and said, 'We love the concert, but where are your tennis shoes and your cute little headbands and everything?' They were so disappointed that we had suits on!"
The hip threads may not have been the point, but the members of Tashi - a Tibetan word meaning "good fortune" and the name of Serkin's dog - enjoyed toying with listeners' expectations, just as the Messiaen piece had done with theirs. Stoltzman remembers a concert on Long Island, where he and Serkin decided to play a piece by Frank Zappa during intermission, unannounced.
"And people went nuts. One man was outraged; he came down and yelled, 'Is this a concert? What are you doing?' Other people said, 'Shh shh!' And other people said, 'This is intermission, we can talk if we want to!'
"It was a great conflagration of attitudes about what is music, what's a concert, what are the relationships between the performers and the audience? Not to answer [the questions], just to bring them out."
Tashi quickly became the gold standard in contemporary music. The ensemble recorded the Messiaen, and to this day there is no better recording in the catalog. Other composers were drawn into its orbit: Charles Wuorinen, Toru Takemitsu, and Peter Lieberson, among others, wrote music for it.
Ironically, by the late '70s, the group that had begun as being about exploration had become a major commitment. Serkin left in 1979, explaining that he wanted to get back to playing solo works. The other three soldiered on under the Tashi moniker, mostly as a clarinet quintet with various guests. "We had maybe 10 more years of commissioning pieces for that combination and making records," says Stoltzman. "It kept the fun of our relationship alive, and I'm so grateful we had that."
Still, there was a widely held sense that the group had ended with Serkin's departure, and a reunion seemed out of the question. "I think Peter especially feels like, man, you do something, you realize it, and you don't go back," says Stoltzman. "You go on to the next [thing] and don't try to sentimentalize."
Nevertheless, about a year and a half ago, Stoltzman got a call from Sherry, who'd spoken to Serkin, who was "sort of thinking about maybe a concert or something" for the Messiaen year. It took a while to come together, and there was trepidation about whether the old chemistry could be rekindled.
Finally last year, the four assembled in Serkin's New York apartment to see what would happen. After about five or 10 seconds of playing, Stoltzman says, "I heard my sound as I remembered it 30-something years ago. Not individually, but my sound as part of the Tashi group - how I felt when I breathed and balanced my sound against Peter's chords and
"It's great, and it's going to be over almost as soon as we get going," he adds. Indeed, they will play only a handful of concerts. He says they're wary of milking the opportunity into a full-blown nostalgia trip. In the true spirit of the group, they're simply enjoying it for what it is, no expectations.
"One of the meanings of the word 'Tashi' is 'appropriate to the moment,' " Stoltzman says. "And that rings true. It's sweet right now - it's just the right moment."
For information call 617-496-2222, or visit music.fas.harvard.edu/calendar.html
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