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Sonatas to Touch the Heart

By Jessica Balik

Strangely enough, listening to achingly poignant music can be pleasantly addictive at times. Rather than making you disheartened, sometimes such music seems to uplift. Pieces with wide emotional contrasts can heighten the boost, as moments of blitheness offer easy respite from the solemnity. Heavy contrasts, though, require musicians who can move from lugubrious to lighthearted without missing a beat.

Anne-Marie McDermott and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg

Violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and pianist Anne-Marie McDermott are surely such musicians. On Sunday they performed three sonatas in a recital at Memorial Auditorium, presented by Stanford Lively Arts. The three works were similar insofar as they all incorporated startlingly vast expressive ranges, which the breathtaking artistry of Salerno-Sonnenberg and McDermott only further exaggerated.

Opening the program was J.S. Bach’s Sonata in E Major for violin and harpsichord. The duo performed it on violin and piano. The four-movement sonata unfolds in a slow-fast-slow-fast scheme. The slow movements were the poignant ones, featuring heavily ornamented violin lines. Even if these lines ultimately conveyed spontaneously erupting emotion, Salerno-Sonnenberg must have meticulously premeditated their nuances, including dynamics and slight tempo fluctuations.

The keyboard part played chiefly an accompanimental role in these slow movements. McDermott shared the spotlight in the fast movements, though, and when she did, the integration of violin and piano was particularly impressive.

Bach’s piece is part of a set of six sonatas for violin and harpsichord. Claude Debussy similarly planned for his Sonata in G Minor to be part of a set of six sonatas for diverse combinations of instruments. Death thwarted his plan. Unlike Bach, therefore, Debussy’s set includes only three sonatas. This disparity is fitting, because the two violin sonatas by Bach and Debussy are indeed quite different.

Wealth of Contrasting Melodies

For example, Bach’s first movement presents a clear melody in the violin, whereas Debussy’s presents a kaleidoscopic array of melodies between both instruments. Since the sonatas were programmed one after another in this recital, however, Debussy’s melancholy first movement evoked the slow movements from Bach’s sonata.

The Bach sonata also featured two lighter, faster movements, which offered some reprieve from the passionate, slower ones. The sad mood in Debussy’s first movement, by contrast, refused to abate. It crept its way into all three movements. Even the très anime third movement could not shake the feeling entirely.

Here, the mood was a menacing undertone, one that most clearly longed to sneak to the surface in passages of nimble running lines. Salerno-Sonnenberg and McDermott often executed them with whisper-soft dynamics. Amid these lines, therefore, lurked a hushed, restrained despair. It was graceful yet frenetic, soft yet certain. Again, though, the effect was deliciously spine-tingling. Less sensitive musicians could not have conveyed it.

After Debussy’s finale and an intervening intermission, the melody that opened César Franck’s Sonata in A Major sounded fresh and simple. The simplicity proved deceptive. Eventually, the straightforward opening melody developed into something tumultuous and soulful. In the hands of Salerno-Sonnenberg and McDermott, this melody burgeoned until it was bursting at the seams with lush Romantic verdure. The second movement was equally impressive. Indeed, it was so convincing that it seemed to impersonate a concert-closing finale. Many in the audience even broke into applause at the movement’s end.

Dark Fantasy

Yet if the last two movements were unexpected by those listeners who were unfamiliar with the piece, the entire audience seemed to appreciate them. Franck called his third movement a Recitativo – Fantasia. In this performance, it was an especially dark and ruminative fantasy. In the finale, Franck repeated the first movement’s technique of expanding on an initially simple melody. The performing duo used the composer’s developmental technique to amplify the sense of decisive finality that they originally imparted through the second movement.

Ultimately, the encore provided a capstone for this recital of poignantly expressive music. It was the famous “Melodie” from Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice. Hector Berlioz, a composer who wrote an influential treatise on instrumentation, once wrote that only a flute could play Gluck’s tune properly. But Berlioz never had the pleasure of hearing Salerno-Sonnenberg perform it on violin.

Gluck intended for his melody to express Orpheus’ grief over Euridice’s death, and Salerno-Sonnenberg’s rendition of the tune conveyed incalculable sadness. If the audience was saddened on hearing it, though, it was only because the melody marked the end of a thoroughly pleasing recital.

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