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The Youths’ Magic Magyar Music New York
Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall
10/26/2026 -
Győrgy Ligeti: Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano
Charles Martin Loeffler Two Rhapsodies for Oboe, Viola and Piano
Zoltán Kodály: Serenade for Two Violins and Viola, Op. 12
Béla Bartók: Contrasts for Clarinet, Violin and Piano, Sz. 111
Ensemble Connect: JJ Silvey (Oboe), Anoush Pogossian (Clarinet), Will Sands (Horn), Laurel Gagnon, Rubén Rengel (Violins), Abby Smith (Viola), Joseph Vaz (Piano)
Ensemble Connect (© Fadi Kheir Photography)
“As soon as the word ‘horn’ was uttered, somewhere inside my head I heard the sound of a horn as if coming from a distant forest in a fairy tale, just as in a poem.”
Győrgy Ligeti, on his Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano
“Music is the heartbeat of human existence; without it, life lacks its deepest rhythm.”
Zoltán Kodály
While I’ve heard the young artists of Ensemble Connect several times, only tonight in Weill Recital Hall was their ultimate secret revealed to me.
It wasn’t the rationale of Ensemble Connect itself. These are the finest players and graduates of America’s finest conservatories, sponsored by Carnegie Hall. Nor their own studies and performances in concert hall, and their extra-curricular activities: for the homeless, for senior citizens, for those imprisoned á la Johnny Cash.
No, without the concordance of a string quartet, every single player showed more than virtuosity. Their temperaments individually projected a wit a vitality, an élan, a youth vigor which more experienced artists sometimes forget.
Each soloist blended artlessness and virtuosity together. Vincent Paz turned Ligeti’s Vivacssisimo molto into a quasi-improvised jazz riff ( transcending Ligeti’s mathematical notation. And aeons better than Stravinsky’s cerebral jabs at jazz. )
Clarinettist Anoush Pogossian and fiddler Laurel Gagnon ignored the usual Bartók adjective “difficult”. Their swirling notes, their cadenzas, their tones zipped through the notes faultlessly.
Nor could one ignore the winds. Horn player Will Sands took this most difficult solo instrument and showed that Ligeti didn’t need “weird” sounds for pleasing eccentricity.
Then we had the rarely played Charles Martin Loeffler–expert violinist, pianist and Viola d’Amore virtuoso. (He wrote a symphony once for orchestra and two Viola d’Amore soloists!). The color of oboe of JJ Silvey and violist Abby Smith was indeed unique.
(I wonder, did this mild-mannered composer ever meet the grouchy Charles Ives?)
Loeffler was the odd man out here. He hated his birthplace Germany, studied in Paris, and wound up for two decades as Second Concertmaster for the Boston Symphony.
Here his Rhapsodies on two poems were pretty, moderately grotesque and had the humor of a bagpipe.
C.M. Loeffler/B. Bartók
(Paintings by John Sargent, 1903, & Róbert Berény, 1913)
The other three works would have the punish title which Kurtág might have called Magyar játékok–The movie–The Hungary Games!
Győrgy Ligeti’s Trio was typical for the master. The composition was complex, the changes, the modulations could probably be as intricate as Webern. But one never felt this. One felt that Ligeti was having sheer fun. Granted, Mr. Sands’ horn overwhelmed the sounds of Ms. Gagnon. But she had her chances later.
Zoltán Kodály had written one of the 20th Century’s most intense chamber works in his Cello Sonata. Here his Serenade was for the unlikely trio of two violins and one viola!
So if the players had treble (sic) in the first two movements, the final Vivo was as great as anything he wrote. Where Bartók instinctively hid his Hungarian styles under a bushel of notes, Kodály let the pizzicato twang, hammerings bang, crazy notes by the bridge and all the singular Magyar magic.
The last work I had tried to play on clarinet–but after four measures, my fingers twisted themselves into a Gordian knot. That was not the problem with Ms. Pogossian, who let herself go will in the finale, as violin and piano exceeded their own talents.
At the end, though, while I was struck with this marvelous quartet of sounds, I had to admit that it couldn’t have been done without the youth, the spirit and the utter joy of these players.
One can only pray that, during their symphonic futures, they retain these singular joyous sonorities.
Harry Rolnick
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