San Francisco Classical Voice

Over the past 40 years, active violin repertory seems to have shrunken in direct proportion to the number of virtuosos on stage. We once had a handful of truly major violinists who played a big variety of music among them. Standard favorites that nearly everyone played, such as the Grieg Third Sonata, seem to have fallen over the cliff. When, dear reader, was the last time you had a chance to hear Enescu's Gypsy-oriented Third Sonata (which Stern and Menuhin each recorded), Fauré's terrific First Sonata, or the big, serious Saint-Sa”ns First Sonata, which Proust so admired? As long as there are violinists like Hope, there's hope.

Hearing the Grieg Third again after so many years proved a refreshing joy. I doubt that anyone would place Grieg among top masters, but he was a respectable artist whose music was heavily programmed a hundred years ago. That the official musical establishment currently tends to downgrade Grieg seems unfair. Granted, he was essentially a miniaturist with an optimistic view of life. There are rarely those expressions of Romantic anguish one commonly finds in Chopin, the other great 19th century miniaturist, but all three of his violin sonatas remain pleasing and thoroughly worthy of the stage.

Grieg was a superb melodist who made subtle contributions to chromatic harmony. But whereas his native Norway is a major economic success in today's Europe, it was not so during Grieg's own lifetime. He had no major outlet for performances of large, melodramatic works there. I suspect that turning out commercially viable music was necessary to avoid economic deprivation.

The Op. 45 sonata contains the expected three movements, featuring a delicate, almost Mozartian slow movement, and a bravura finale that is certain to lift an audience to its feet, as it did last Tuesday. Hope and Knauer made the most of the piece, playing without emotive smearing through exaggerated rubato. For today's audience, that air of simplicity is a must, or the music turns silly. (That may account for Debussy's sarcastic appraisal of Greig's style as ”a bonbon filled with snow” — this despite the traces of Grieg's influence that can be heard in Debussy's early piano works.)

The Messiaen — a theme with five diverse variations — is surprisingly mature for its time, considering that the composer was just opening his career when he wrote it. The complex layers of texture characterizing his later music are nowhere to be heard, yet the vocabulary of the Variations often hints at what future compositions will offer. One can pick out ghostly traces of what turns up in the Quatuor pour la fin du temps and the organ suite, L'Ascension. The little scherzo variation, for instance, strongly hints at Messiaen's later quotations of bird song, which came into full force 20 years later. Ultimately, the Variations are well crafted and surprisingly compact, and Hope and Knauer gave them their full due.

Brahms' Third is, of course, a major repertory item, easily the most dramatic of his three. In four movements rather than Grieg's three, the piece was given an appropriately inward-looking performance, breaking fully loose only in its fiercest passages. I especially admired the way Hope took a meditatively soft approach to the very opening. Like those heartbreaking small, late pieces of Brahms for solo piano, this sonata is less extreme in its sense of loneliness than the Clarinet Quintet, but its woe can be palpable when played as knowingly as it was by Hope.

Copland's short, quiet piece turns out to be a little jewel, not at all trivial. Like others among his early works, there are little blues motives and hints of soft jazz in the accompaniment. The piece makes a fine addition to a limited selection of American compositions, a lovely short work written specifically for the violin.

As for Schnittke, Hope studied with him and obviously reveres the Russian composer. In his brief remarks before playing that sonata, Hope referred to Schnittke as “towering.” Schnittke has a following, but I cannot for the life me understand why. He never seems able to make up his mind as to which style he wants to ape, bouncing about between periods and composers like the ball in a pinball machine. I always find myself wishing Schnittke would come to the point, if indeed he had one. He sounds to me like a little satellite whirling about the universe, off course. His three-movement First Violin Sonata failed to strike me as either fish or fowl, only as a waste of time and opportunity.

As a boy, Hope became a protégé of Yehudi Menuhin (the two even performed duos while Hope was in his teens). Some of Menuhin's intellectual and technical skills were apparent during Hope's performance, especially beauty of timbre and sturdy intonation. Little wonder that critics are hailing him as England's finest violinist, even comparing him the late cellist Jacqueline du Pré in terms of talent. Strange, that his local recital debut has taken so long to materialize, especially considering his numerous international awards and his widely praised recordings of the Berg and Britten concertos. Hope belongs among today's top violinists, right up there with Gil Shaham.

A special note of praise is also due to German pianist Knauer, who was a superb partner throughout. A fine artist, he managed to overcome one of my pet peeves: accompanying with the large piano top full open. That normally makes for too much piano, but not in Knauer's skillful hands. Balances were beautifully appropriate throughout, with piano dynamics only forward when the violin was silent for a few bars. These two musicians formed an exceptional partnership.