Sibling
Revelry
By
Paul Rapp
The Ahn Trio
Troy Savings
Bank Music Hall, Feb. 10
 The
Ahn Trio consists of three beautiful, young Korean sisters,
who are leaders of the growing movement to sex up classical
music. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Au contraire,
kemosabe! Virtuosic classical music can be a damn sexy thing
by itself—add vibrant, modern, pretty performers, and, well,
the package can be quite devastating.
Maybe “sexing up” is a bit strong. The Ahns seem to be girls
who just wanna have fun, and their thing is a mix of Ms. Lauper,
Charlie’s Angels and Marlo Thomas, together with some
strong kimchi. They aren’t so much provocative as they are
funky and fun. Their Web site has all the bright chirpiness
of a teen-pop-star magazine, with lots of pictures of big
smiles and carefree ensemble crossings of city streets. And
enough bad puns involving their name to make Greg Kihn blush.
None of this would matter a whole lot if the girls didn’t
deliver onstage. But deliver they did. Friday night’s program,
before a sadly small audience at the Troy Music Hall, began
with a tepid run through an arrangement of a Haydn string
quartet. There were some intonation problems, and while the
three played as an organic unit, things seemed generally tired,
and the smiles onstage appeared to be forced, rather than
beaming. Which is perhaps understandable, as a mid-tour show
for a one-third-full house on a chilly night in Troy is no
one’s idea of a career gig. This subdued beginning did allow
the music patrons an opportunity to inspect the ensemble’s
ensembles: Maria (cello) wore a long, red satin coat with
tight, shiny black pants; Lucia (piano, and Maria’s twin)
wore a tropical halter number with a brightly striped, long,
billowing dress; and Angella (violin) wore hip-hugging leather
pants and big-league heels.
The Ahns moved on to material from their most recent album,
Ahn-plugged (see what I mean?), and things cranked
up immediately. First was Leonard Bernstein’s Trio for
Violin, Cello and Piano, written in 1937, when Bernstein
was 19. Introduced by Angella as “the reason we don’t try
to write our own material,” the piece crackled with ideas
and motion. Bernstein was clearly listening to loads of Gershwin
and Copland when he wrote this—but there was also plenty of
discord (which always seemed to resolve, right on time) and
several repetitious and rhythmic passages that foreshadowed
what Phillip Glass would make a career out of 40 years later,
except where Glass sits on a passage for interminable periods,
Bernstein holds an idea long enough for the listener to get
the point, and then quickly moves along to something else.
A somber piece titled “Lullaby,” by a composer whose name
I didn’t catch, sounded too much like a morbid soundtrack
to a melodramatic B-movie to be taken seriously. The Ahns
fared better with a cool version of the Doors’ “Riders on
the Storm” (featuring thunder provided by Lucia bouncing a
tennis ball on the lower-register strings inside her piano),
and a couple of wonderful pieces by Argentinean composer Astor
Piazzolla, which were alternatively romantic, wacky and startling.
The high point of the show was Eric Ewzen’s “The Diamond World,”
a piece written for the Ahns. It incorporated plenty of pop
form and convention, but was at the same time as complex and
cat-and-mouse as the most rigorous grand-master chamber piece—and
it had an ending that could have come out of any great mid-’70s
prog-rock record.
The performance became increasingly cohesive and kinetic,
gaining grace, natural interplay, and excitement as the evening
progressed. The girls were killin’ and by the end, everybody
in the house, onstage and off, was smiling easily.
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