One really spectacular dish can make a dinner; a single marvelous day can make a vacation; and one knockout performance can make a recital worth remembering. Violinist Janet Packer's performance at Old First Church on Friday evening will linger long in the memory, both for the sheer quality of one of the performances and for the puzzle of why the rest were so different.

The Old First's regular audience was liberally sprinkled with prominent Bay Area composers, all there to hear Andrew Imbrie's 1998 Soliloquy for solo violin, written for Packer. Imbrie is the kind of composer who inspires loyalty, and deserves it. This is not "cutting-edge" music--which is only to say that it is likely to last for some time. The piece is built around a single, simple motto theme, a few recognizable notes, recurring periodically. The prevailing mood is lyrical, pensive; but there is a frolicsome spirit too, apparent even in the first few lines. The music is almost all monophonic (unusual for a new solo violin piece) and, despite a certain angularity, somehow vocal.

Imbrie's is not flashy music. Apart from an interior section in double-stopped counterpoint (one that, to this violinist's ear at least, recalled Ysaÿe's solo sonatas) and a frenetic, jagged climax, there is little of overt virtuosity in Soliloquy. But it is, in the true meaning of the words, satisfying stuff. There is nothing empty or hollow in it; it is all music.

Packer played it magnificently. Working from memory (as she did throughout the evening), she revealed an opulent tone, a swashbuckling bow arm, meticulous intonation, and a keen sense of gesture. Her playing was theatrical, not in the easy sense that brings to mind "theatrics," but in the sense of a master teller of tales or a wizard of stagecraft.

All the more disappointing, then, the rest of the recital. To say that there seemed to be two different violinists on the program is a journalistic cliché, but here, for once, it was really true. I doubt that many listeners would have identified by ear alone the confident virtuosa of the Imbrie with the player of the three violin/piano duos on the same recital.

That Packer's sound seemed so much weaker and patchier in the duos may have been partly the fault of her partner, pianist Orin Grossman, whose playing tended towards the loud and over-pedaled throughout. She seemed frequently to be struggling to project. (The duo's decision to leave the piano's lid full up for all three pieces certainly didn't help matters.)

But the more fundamental problem was that Packer seemed hardly to be paying attention to Grossman at all. She stood aloof from the piano, staring resolutely into space, apparently fixed on some private vision. The pose worked rather well for Havergal Brian's Legend, a sort of brief Celtic tale-in-music, in which the violin is anyway the obvious protagonist. But in Beethoven's ethereal G-major sonata, Op. 96, it was a disaster. The piece, like all of Beethoven's sonatas, is a duo, a partnership; and Packer all too obviously saw her pianist as an accompanist. Everywhere there ought to have been some sort of personal relationship between the parts--banter, complicity, even a mere genial exchange of social pleasantries--there was nothing.

This was, obviously, damaging to the interpretation of the Beethoven, even from the point of view of the violin part alone; it's next to impossible to inflect such music at all without a willing partner at the piano. And this was a sadly uninflected performance, a long string of missed opportunities. It was the variation finale that suffered most. The theme has a startling harmonic shift in its middle, one practically begging for some subtle change of color or mood both on the way in and (even more) on the way out. There was nothing--not in the theme, not in the many subsequent variations.

But Packer's interpretive distance from the piano had more immediate and cruder consequences, too. She was simply not in tune with the piano at all for most of the evening, tending sharp in a degree that would have been alarming in a singer and was downright scary in a string player. That she did not adjust her pitch, even when the discrepancy was at its worst (I am not exaggerating in putting it at almost a quarter-tone away from the piano), only reinforced the impression that she regarded the pianist as a sort of background noise.

The Brian and the Beethoven together occupied the first half of the recital. The Imbrie, opening the second half, introduced the "other" Janet Packer; and I was so startled by her easy mastery of the instrument and her apparently flawless intonation that I immediately began to look forward to the Debussy sonata to follow. The first violin entry--once again horribly sharp to the piano--brought me back down to earth. But this was actually a rather good performance, alert to the music's constant shifts of mood and touched with real fire in places (Packer can make an amazing sound on the lower strings when she chooses to). The encore was more Debussy--a transcription of F'tes from the Trois Nocturnes--but worked less well; music as fantastically colored as this needs, well, a fantastic colorist of a player to survive in such a stripped-down arrangement.

(Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.)

©2000 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved