Arkel Chamber Concerts: Under a Veil of Stars. Franz Schubert: piano trio in E flat; Kevin Lau: piano trio. Winona Zelenka, cello; Marie Bérard, violin; Philip Chiu, piano. May 18, 2025, Trinity St-Paul’s Centre, Toronto.
A week after the cherry blossoms bloomed, when the city became gloomy again, the prospect of hearing Schubert played live on a Sunday afternoon promised to be a delight.
But, before we heard the music of that master, we were met with the concert’s namesake: Kevin Lau’s Under A Veil of Stars, a 25-minute piano trio made up of three dreamy movements.
Kevin Lau: Piano Trio
In the show’s opening remarks, co-founder and violinist Marie Berard told the audience it was based on a short story by Lau about a girl who chases and catches stars. With that image in mind, then, we are ushered into the piece, which, along with Bérard, is wonderfully brought to life by co-founder and cellist Winona Zelenka and the guest of the Arkel Chamber Concert, the acclaimed pianist Philip Chiu, whose graceful, nimble fingers are well-suited to evoke the image of the stars, which, by turns, twinkle and burst, eliciting his impassioned head jerks.
Chiu is the kind of pianist whose hands, having dashed off a note, remain suspended in the air for some time, recovering from the impact of its utterance, a notable gesture of his.
Bérard, elegant, whose violin gave voice to anxiety in the work, trilled and thrilled.
But near the end of the first movement, it is Zelenka, in her modest outfit, whose instrument gets the chance to shine. In a solo that evoked the “unabashed romanticism” and “simmering emotions” Bérard had advantageously warned us to be sensitive to, she ravishes.
The cello channeled the message of the piece, which — before our eyes and within our ears — matured, movement to movement, from juvenile bewilderment to adolescent resentment and finally to lived-in grief, where refrains from the past can glimmer at the edges of the mind.
What I admired about the piano trio was witnessing the way the music circulated through the instruments, so that there were moments they were in complete harmony, and others when they conjured up a dark discordance, punctuated by plucked strings and eighth notes.
For long stretches Lau’s work can appear to be ambiguous, impenetrable, until, all of a sudden, it springs into action: racing, whirling, transcending towards states of transcendence.
The third movement, In That Shoreless Ocean…, is based on Rabindranath Tagore’s poem “Sail Away,” which ends, “Who knows when the chains will be off/and the boat/like the last glimmer of sunset, vanish into the night?” In the final movement, Lau slows things down and allows the uncertainty of that final line to announce itself through the Chiu’s dramatic flair, which expresses its wit and mischievousness en route to the piece’s tempered, tranquil end.
Schubert: Piano Trio No. 2
“I’ve had enough applause,” Chiu said after the intermission, during his introduction of Schubert’s Piano Trio No.2 in E-flat Major.
Through a series of facts — his early death, his syphilis, his reputation as a curmudgeon — Chiu declared Schubert “the most emo of composers” and a “poet-painter” (a term which curiously echos the “pianist-painter” La Presse had dubbed Chiu himself).
It remains true that Schubert succeeds in evoking a stirring sense of melancholy, which is most evident in the second movement, the infamous “Andante Con Moto,” nearly 200 years after its first public performance. It was in these moments that the performance of the piece enhanced the beauty of it; first Chiu plays a refrain, followed by Zelenka, then Bérard — an order which Schubert, masterfully, reverses in the fourth movement, “Allegro moderato,” creating the sensation that they build upon each other’s articulation individually before forming a collective.
Their classical interpretation of the piano trio meant the piece remained familiar, resulting in moments when it was easy to lose one’s attention in the sunny opulence, where the images of ballrooms, candlelight, and silk dresses from films like Barry Lyndon appeared before our eyes.
What I gleaned about Schubert was the way that his music behaved, which, similar and complimentary to Lau’s sensibility, seemed to replicate a mind traversing through a crowd, taking in the world around them, before turning inwards and travelling down digressive trains of thought that are suddenly — and this is its revitalizing effect — disrupted by a buoyant spirit that, despite its strength, can never fully escape a pure despair that exists deep within each of us.
In the fourth movement, the force of Berard’s violin comes to the fore, leading the conversation among them, alternately synchronizing and devolving to a purely ecstatic effect.
Final Thoughts
Near the end of the performance, as a musical phrase once again travelled between them like a secret, I looked up at the high ceilings of the Trinity St. Paul’s Centre and the sun shone bright through the stain-glass, and just then the trio’s refrain, which, up until then, had been mournful, turned blithe.
This moment reminded me of a scene early on in Henry James’ 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady, when Isabel Archer, in search of her aunt throughout Gardencourt and fearing her uncle may be dead, is given pause by “an unexpected sound — the sound of low music proceeding apparently from the saloon.” She enters the room and discovers Madame Merle “playing something of Schubert’s — Isabel knew not what, but recognized Schubert — and she touched the piano with a discretion of her own.”
After her performance, Isabel praises her, adding that her sickly uncle would benefit from hearing such lovely music, but Madame Merle discriminates.
“I’m afraid there are moments in life when even Schubert has nothing to say to us,” she says to her: “We must admit, however, that they are our worst.”
What a pleasure it was then, that afternoon, to not have been in one of those moments, but to have had the privilege and pleasure to be in that one, where we could hear what Lau had to say and hear again — thus anew — to Schubert too: a re-affirmation that three is a magic number.
By: Nirris Najendrarajah for LvT
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