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RECITAL REVIEW
March 26, 2004
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By Michelle Dulak
It is typical of Old First Concerts to present a fine and little-known violinist in fine and little-known music. Janet Packer and
Orin Grossman gave a brilliantly-designed recital Friday night at Old First Church, full of unfamiliar and yet complementary music,
and ending with a fine and almost unknown major work by a major American composer.
The unnamed program-note writer claims that Amy Beach's Op. 34 Sonata (1896) is "probably the finest violin-piano sonata ever
written by an American." It's not a claim I'd like to make myself, when the field includes the likes of Charles Ives and Irving
Fine and Ruth Crawford Seeger, but Beach's sonata is strong and characterful music. (I hope the annotater isn't right in asserting
that it is "arguably the best work by Beach," because if there is any more music of this caliber sitting around in her portfolio,
it ought to be played.) The idiom is a lot like Franck; in fact, it's very nearly the violin sonata Franck didn't write
— quite unlike the limpid Sonata he did write, but very like an expert violin-and-piano transfiguration of something like his
String Quartet.
It has a sweeping, lyrical first movement (with an especially fetching second theme), and a scherzo that's nearly worthy of
Fauré or even Kreisler (though I doubt Kreisler would have come up with the tortuously chromatic Trio). The slow movement
turns alarmingly into a facsimile of the end of Chausson's Poème, trills and all, at one point, but otherwise it's a
study in steady, sustained lyricism. Beach evidently knew her Wagner; if you hadn't come to that conclusion during the third
movement, you would have in the finale, which is full of soulful appoggiature that sound as though they've drifted in from
Die Meistersinger.
Packer brought more power and passion to the Beach than she did to anything else on the program. I got the impression that here I was hearing her at her best. And her best is really something. The sound she gets out of her instrument in the lower positions, especially on the inner strings, has a woody depth to it; it's a sound with personality. And when she chooses to, she can articulate furiously and with tremendous character. But even in the Beach I was troubled by Packer's sound high up on the fingerboard. The notes far up the E string that ought to have been climactic weren't. They were there, and in tune, but I found myself longing for the stereotypical virtuoso's "hot sound." (In the passages up the G string, I occasionally wished for the virtuoso's unerring intonation as well.) And there was something a little generic about the playing all evening. The opening Schumann First Sonata was brilliantly played, but in that piece that's not good enough. The first movement has to be so intense as to sound practically deranged if it's to work at all. The second needs difficult and very rapid shifts of mood and color. The last is maybe the hardest; there's practically nothing anyone can do to make it come off, but varying the articulation and the accents will at least help. Packer was frustratingly "correct" without ever quite making the music work.
The same was true of the Schubert B-minor Rondo. That's a piece that takes a certain swagger to bring off, but also a certain tenderness. Packer had the swagger — some of it, anyway — but when it came to all those juicy Schubertian third-related modulations, she sailed straight through as though the harmony hadn't changed at all. (No, that's not quite true: she smiled at every one of those changes. But she never altered her sound. I don't know why not.) Juan Orrego-Salas' Turns and Returns, his Op. 121, was written in 2001 for Janet Packer, and Friday's performance was the San Francisco premiere. Packer laid out the plot of the piece for the audience beforehand, mentioning in particular that a certain dramatic piano gesture (she called it "the theme from 'Dragnet,'" and that wasn't far off from the reality) would happen four times, and that in between all manner of other things would happen, and happen again. That was certainly true. The music veered moment by moment from Stravinskian crispness to Szymanowskian sensuality and back again. I only wish that Packer had had as many personae as Orrego-Salas evidently does. She played deftly and with great technical skill, but there was more in that piece than she could extract from it. Grossman tracked her with remarkable accuracy here as throughout, given that she was standing behind him through the entire program (just as Hilary Hahn did in her recent recital — I hope this is not a trend). I wish I had liked his playing better than I did. It was muddy and consistently over-pedaled. I had put the muddiness down to the piano lid being on short stick until the fugato in the last movement of the Beach, where Grossman suddenly broke out a nimble staccato touch that I didn't know he had until that moment. It would have been useful several places earlier in the recital.
(Michelle Dulak, editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, 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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Janet Packer