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RECITAL REVIEW
May 9, 2004
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By Jeff Rosenfeld
Toward the end of a mostly glorious recital on Sunday, the fresh breeze blowing through the open windows at Noe Valley Ministry playfully flipped through the pages of violinist Jorja Fleezanis's music, interrupting a flawlessly projected melody. Fleezanis smiled faintly for a moment and quickly turned back to the right page, barely missing a beat. The breeze fit right in this concert billowing with fresh programming, but the smile itself was a rare break in the otherwise ardently serious playing.
Weightiest of all was the mighty Sonata for Violin and Piano (the first of two) by Ernest Bloch. For these 30 minutes of nearly unrelieved passion, Fleezanis and pianist Karl Paulnack sustained more fervor than seemed humanly possible. Paulnack, who is director of music at the Boston Conservatory, never overwhelmed Fleezanis's violin, but his gusto for thick sonorities and the savage ostinati stopped only a short distance shy of belligerent.
The Bloch sounded like an extension of early Bartók and Stravinsky, which is appropriate for a 1920 work that juggles time signatures and overworks its rhythmic drive. At the same time, however, Fleezanis's husky, muscular tone conveyed every ounce of the rhapsodic, late Romantic flair of the violin part. She also easily navigated Bloch's wickedly incessant double-stops. Not surprisingly, as a veteran of the Chicago Symphony and San Francisco Symphony, and now the celebrated concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra, she displayed superb intonation and a very disciplined, unstrained approach to her articulation, blunting some of the folksy elements of Bloch's idiom but also tempering the tumultuous sonority.
The 1959 Sonata Concertante by Peter Mennin opened the program with a similarly driven, intense partnership. After announcing his intentions with a flourish that sounds like the violin is going to launch into a Bach solo partita, Mennin's first movement settles into a neo-baroque pattern with running counterpoint in the piano pushing the music along and the violin floating most of the melodic material on top of it. The combination of Paulnack's driving, emphatic piano and Fleezanis's open-hearted emotional response was equally winning here. If your model for Mennin's work veers toward Hindemith and conservative neo-something expression, then perhaps it was a bit too heavy; but this is also tough-minded, hard working music that seems to respond to the power that Fleezanis and Paulnack brought to it. Certainly it is music that should be heard more often, blending, as Fleezanis noted to the audience, the “comfortable” and the “crazed.” As far removed as possible from these worldly, earthy pieces was the more familiar Theme and Variations by Olivier Messiaen. This early (1934) work by the spiritual French maverick has some of the hallmarks of his later style. In particular, it is less a set of variations than a spiraling arc of repetition, subtly transforming a naïve, exquisite melody into an ecstatic vision. The gradual climb to the final variation is almost imperceptible, but as a path to revelation, it has an unforgettable passion at its climax. True to form, Fleezanis and Paulnack didn't really follow this script. They intensified the music quickly, reaching, and sustaining, a plateau of effervescence for the duration. In particular, in this work, Fleezanis's complex, somewhat grainy, sound had a shimmering beauty that commanded the church. Throughout the concert, in fact, she seemed to generate more of this elusive resonance than sweet, focused purity — perhaps a triumph of emotional zest over intimacy. If this had any drawbacks, it was probably in the opening of the Messiaen or in the more lyrical middle movement of the Mennin. On the other hand, her sound was a strength in John Tavener's My Gaze is Ever Upon You, a recent work for solo violin and tape. The tape consists of a double bass drone and a second violin part (Fleezanis herself), recorded in a highly resonant acoustic (in this case back in Minneapolis). Live and taped, Fleezanis was a good match for herself, even though the resonant acoustic of the tape was inevitably blurred the violin more than the church could.
The ultimate problem with the Tavener was not the slight acoustic mismatch between tape and reality but rather the tedium of the music itself and the poor conception by the composer. The music takes after Messiaen's repetition without traditional development, but extends the philosophy beyond tolerance — in this case to nearly 20 minutes. Tavener seems to be looking for the spiritual and ecstatic, like Messiaen, but has crossed the line into the meditative simplicity of, say, Pauline Oliveros, without the clever acoustic sense. The tape was just a substitute for actually having another violinist and bass on stage. Better use of the electronic gear was Mario Davidovsky's Synchronisms No. 6 for tape and piano. This 1971 Pulitzer Prize winning piece is a classic in the genre. It may be ugly at times, and the electronic sounds are a bit dated, even silly. However, Davidovsky secures inventive sonic subtleties (like the electronic crescendo possible after the pianist strikes and holds a key). More importantly, the narrative thread is suggestive, perhaps of the unruly electronic world disrupting, echoing, and then integrating with the piano, even teaching the acoustic world a few valuable lessons as played out in the inner mechanisms of the instrument. Read this way, Synchronisms No. 6 is an early version of the rapproachment between alien and human sentimentalized in Spielberg's ET. Paulnack's precise timing and controlled shading at the keyboard (and behind it) made the live experience worthy. The Davidovsky piece brought a little delicacy to an otherwise ripely passionate concert.
(Jeff Rosenfeld is an oboist with the Kensington Symphony, West County Winds, and Pacific Wind Ensemble. He is a freelance science journalist and author of the recent book, Eye of the Storm: Inside the World's Deadliest Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and Blizzards.)
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Jorja Fleezanis