Attentive listeners had much to contemplate and enjoy at the Le Salon de Musiques concert on Sunday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The three composers represented on the program – Samuel Barber, Rebecca Clarke and Amy Beach – though disparate in life, shared an aesthetic realm. All three found the center of their careers’ gravity in the United States (Barber and Beach were Americans, while the English-born Clarke spent most of her life here) and wielded a late or post-Romantic idiom that was out of step with much of the 20th century.

More to the point, the program intimated that the trio shared something else: Marginalization on account of their gender or sexual orientation.

This is rather less true in the case of Barber who, despite being openly gay, enjoyed the support of musicians such as Serge Koussevitzky and Dimitri Mitropoulos, and overall enjoyed an enviable career. (It is worth remembering that being openly gay was no hindrance to the careers of other 20th century composers, most notably Aaron Copland and Benjamin Britten.)

His “Adagio for Strings,” for example, was premiered in its string orchestra guise by Arturo Toscanini and has since become the most oft-performed piece by any American composer. Le Salon de Musiques presented the original string quartet version in a dignifiedly restrained performance befitting this elegiacally yet austere work. That restraint characterizes most of his work, as was heard in his “Hermit Songs,” which was sung with a fine attention to diction and legato by soprano Elisa Johnston. Her partner, pianist Vijay Venkatesh, has distinguished himself at previous Le Salon de Musiques concerts and did not disappoint here. He provided a supple, yielding accompaniment that effortlessly blended and contrasted with Johnston’s voice.

A better case for ex post facto marginalization is seen in the example of Amy Beach who at the height of her career was one of the best-known American composers and performers. Being a woman certainly was an important reason for her subsequent airbrushing out of the repertoire as well as out of music history.

But there was another reason her music was already being largely neglected even in her later years:
That for all its surface attractiveness and pleasing late-Romantic harmonies, her music – as exemplified by her 1907 “Piano Quintet,” which was performed last Sunday with fine polish and transparency – tended towards the prolix and blustery, staunchly refusing to meet the winds of musical change that already were kicking up the dust during the era of the work’s composition. (Gustav Mahler, Carl Nielsen, Jean Sibelius, Richard Strauss, and Alexander Scriabin, all of them approximate contemporaries of Beach, were already pushing the boundaries of musical grammar. And in neighboring Connecticut, Charles Ives was already beginning to fashion his unique crazy-quilt Americana take on modernism unlike anything heard then in the United States or even Europe.)

Of the three composers performed, only Rebecca Clarke, whose “Piano Trio” and “Three Movements for two violins and piano” formed the centerpiece of Sunday’s program, could be said to have been truly marginalized. In her case, doubly so. Not only has her work been mostly forgotten by posterity, in life she grappled constantly with ingrained biases against her talent on account of her gender. One is tempted to say “genius” rather than “talent.” Her “Three Movements” was more conventional fare that was evolved from the salon music tradition. But her “Piano Trio” was a genuine and very delightful discovery. It also exhibited a quality that Barber and Beach never quite had: passion.

From the arresting opening bars of the work – with its powerful bass octaves and arpeggios in the piano, the surging figures in the strings – to the very coda of its sardonic finale, Clarke demonstrated not only a masterly grasp of form and texture, but also an unerring knack for dramatic gesture. Her idiom is brawny and big-fisted, spiked with unexpected harmonic modulations and dissonances that look to Beethoven, Franck, and Ravel while remaining utterly original.

The performance by violinist Chiai Tajima, cellist Eric Byers, and Venkatesh were fluent, potent; amply meeting and surmounting the challenges set by this remarkable score.

Le Salon de Musiques’ François Chouchan has a brilliant instinct for unearthing composers and works somehow cast aside by history, often managing even to surprise the connoisseur. But with Rebecca Clarke he has perhaps shared his greatest discovery yet to the chamber series’ audience. It is nothing short of tragic that the circumstances of her life should have forced Clarke to compose relatively little. (In the last 30 years of her life – she died only in 1979 at the age of 93 – she composed virtually nothing.) But one is grateful for discerning ears like Chouchan’s that bring this music to light for a wider audience.

There is much about Clarke – her life as well as her art – that speaks vitally to our time. Here is a composer who was the equal of any of her male contemporaries and is worthy of global fame. One hopes that Le Salon de Musiques can be persuaded to program an entire concert of Clarke’s music in some not too distant future.

  Nestor CASTIGLIONE