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RECITAL REVIEW
April 27, 2006
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The Gordian Knot Unty'd By Michelle Dulak Thomson
When people care about a matter deeply, intimacy is practically a recipe
for enmity. There's no surer way to provoke a quarrel than to throw
together a lot of folks who all believe passionately in the same thing,
but disagree about what exactly it is. If proof is
needed, just read Jonathan Russell's article on new music in the Bay
Area in last week's SFCV, and the many reader responses in the
current issue.
To caricature: One party agrees with Russell that most of
the music performed by the ensembles he names is dull and without any
sort of striking profile. The other party is tired of being told that it
isn't sufficiently "cutting-edge" for the likes of its supposed aesthetic betters, and not-always-politely wishes the first party would just go form its own ensembles
(to do the music it likes) and leave other ensembles to do the music
they like in peace. When it is being particularly cheeky, it
points out that the partisans of the first party enjoy an awful lot more
purely commercial success, governmental support, and the like than do
partisans of the second. Things generally degenerate from there.
Trust Midori to walk in here and cut the Gordian Knot. If nothing else,
her symposium on April 16 and her recital with pianist Robert McDonald
on April 27 laid out the common ground. Perform music you believe in;
know why you believe in it; tell people why you believe in it; perform
it well. If we could all agree that this is what we mean to do, perhaps
we could stop sniping about other people performing pieces we think
are dull. Or vulgar. Or too static. Or too jittery. Or [insert your own peeve
here]. And in the process we might end up with personal "playlists" like
Midori's, which would be a wonderful thing.
It wasn't a program that screamed "High Modernism," though it wouldn't
have taken an experienced eye to find the one obviously "light" piece on
offer. That was Judith Weir's Music for 247 Strings, a whirlwind
sequence of tiny movements that opened the concert. The title refers to
the combined strings of violin and piano, and the idea evidently is to
make the two part of the same larger instrument, as much as possible. So
for the first few movements, violin and piano are always in rhythmic
unison. Later one or the other has some brief independence, but only for
a while. There is an episode with some pretty broad "meows" in it, and a
whimsical ending that owed not a little to Midori's bow control.
Györgi Kurtág's Tre pezzi, Op. 14e, was slight in a quite different way, delicate and spare and yet meaning something in every note. If you've played much Webern, you recognize the tone. It doesn't draw attention to itself; it practically begs to go offstage. Midori didn't go offstage, but she spoke more quietly than I've ever heard a violinist dare. The pieces are based on songs, and something of the frailty and humanity of song clung to the line even when the violin part broke it up into two lines. Alexander Goehr's Suite, Op. 70, was harder to get a grip on. There's something slightly "off" about a "suite" in three movements, especially when it's hard to tell when the second ends and the third begins, and especially when its central variations leave you so few signposts. As it was, it was easier to sense the differences between variations after they'd gone by than in the event, not because they were too rapid but because they were sometimes so ornate that you could only figure out the "pattern" of a variation well into the next one. Which is just another way of saying that I need, and want, another listen. And so do I, emphatically, for Isang Yun's remarkable Violin Sonata No. 1, which is so full of incident of every kind that the obvious reaction would be to say that you're tired of incident, and be done with it. Not so. If you hear incident like this, you do want to hear it again, and soon, because you are positive you've missed something somewhere. I know I did. I have my highlights, some of them purely violinistic (Midori positively ought not to have that fourth finger; it's unfair!), some of them musical, like the strange tonal chords that pop up occasionally, to be used in completely unexpected ways. At the last, the piece practically threatens to end itself in C major. Where it actually goes, even the composer does his best to leave unclear, but it's about the best inconclusive tonal ending since Britten's Third Quartet of 30 years ago.
The concluding work was the only one anyone was likely to know, Lutoslawski's Partita, written more than 20 years ago for Pinchas Zukerman and about the closest thing we have to a modern violin/piano classic. It goes without saying that Midori played the hell out of it, but it ought not to go without saying that she made the thing live. You do not all that often get such conviction bundled so conveniently with such technique. But I've heard a couple of other performances, by lesser violin/piano duos, that still conveyed something of the glorious power of the piece. Midori said at the conclusion of the symposium (in reponse to a question) that as she was under exclusive contract to Sony, she could not record any of this music, even at her own expense. You have a grievance about boring new music concerts? Get this concert onto a CD, and see whether other violinists will tread these angels' paths.
(Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about
music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America,
and The New York Times.)
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Midori