Washington Classical Review

Counterpoint with baritone Robin McGinniss performed Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte at a concert Friday night at Dupont Underground. Photo: Adam Green

The Counterpoint Concerts series opened its third season Friday night. Since splitting off from the Classical Arts Ensemble in 2024, founder Natalia Kazaryan has led intriguing programs in small venues around the city.

This program for the American semiquincentennial, devoted to composers who immigrated to the United States, took place in Dupont Underground. The subterranean bypass beneath Dupont Circle, created for the bygone D.C. streetcar system, now hosts art exhibits and other events. The trendy space has no restrooms or climate control system, making the air quite uncomfortable down there in this extended Washington summer.

Kazaryan, a Juilliard-trained pianist from Tbilisi who now teaches at Howard University, opened the evening with Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in B minor, Op. 32, no. 10. This moody piece showcased her delicate touch at the Blüthner piano. The underground space, which is cavernous and concrete, can be over-resonant at loud dynamics, but Kazaryan managed not to let her forceful side overwhelm the acoustic.

Violinist Miho Saegusa, of the Aizuri Quartet, joined Kazaryan for an equally well-scaled rendition of Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances. Saegusa’s meaty sound, full of diverse tonal qualities, suited these brief character pieces. Folksy flair enlivened the “Stick Dance” and “Sash Dance,” while her glossy whistle-tone harmonics gave “In One Spot,” with its exotic intervals, an otherworldly sheen. A broad romantic sound and sharp attacks made the concluding dances just as exciting.

Counterpoint founder Natalia Kazaryan introduced the works at Friday’s concert. Photo: Adam Green

The music of Lera Auerbach, the Soviet-born composer educated at Juilliard, has consistently proven among the most rewarding new compositions in recent decades. In her Piano Trio No. 2, subtitled “Triptych – This Mirror Has Three Faces,” from 2012, Auerbach reworked themes from her 24 Preludes for piano. The five movements, according to their titles, describe the opening of an altarpiece in three panels, from its closed position to both wings open and back again.

Kazaryan anchored the piece effectively, hammering out dissonant clusters and, from the first movement onward, a bell-tone ostinato figure that haunted the performance. Violinist Katie Hyun and cellist Joseph Gotoff matched Kazaryan in intensity, some fitful issues with intonation in exposed passages apart. The third movement, a grotesque waltz, evoked a haunted fun house, which the venue’s lurid red and green lighting echoed.

The fourth section, describing the triptych’s chaotic central panel, proved a little too active rhythmically for the echoing acoustic. Kazaryan’s repeated-note theme floated nervously, with baroque overtones in Hyun’s rapid violin figuration. The concluding lament, a nostalgic Rachmaninoff-like theme, depicted the closing of the altarpiece, as the tune was gradually dissected into pieces.

After intermission—and a welcome chance to seek fresher air at street level—Kazaryan performed Tan Dun’s Eight Memories in Watercolor. Only at the end of the Cultural Revolution, thanks to the long-awaited death of Mao Zedong, could the Chinese composer pursue musical studies at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, where he wrote these eight pieces in 1978 to 1979. Redolent of Debussy’s Preludes and abounding in folk-like, pentatonic melodies, each movement offered a slender but often diverting vignette, from playful and joyous to more delicate and shaded.

The concert concluded with Arnold Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, an anti-Hitler diatribe made when the composer had fled to these shores. Violist Allyson Goodman joined Hyun, Saegusa, Gotoff, and Kazaryan in this twelve-tone cacophony. With so much dissonance careening about, the balance of the larger ensemble seemed less carefully calibrated to the space, making a chaotic tumult that washed over the listener.

Baritone Robin McGinness made Schoenberg’s Sprechstimme vocal part, a rapid-fire recitation of Lord Byron’s ode of disillusionment in Napoleon, more melodic than spoken. In spite of admirable diction, the words became difficult to understand when the instrumental ensemble railed away at full volume. Byron ended his poem with some admirable lines about a better political hero, our own George Washington, which gave the concert finale a timely patriotic touch.

Cellist Gabriel Cabezas and violinist Domenic Salerni join Natalia Kazaryan for piano trios by Katherine Balch, Shawn Okpebholo, Pascal Le Boeuf, and Ravel 6:30 p.m. November 6. counterpointconcerts.org

Photo: C Downey.