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RECITAL REVIEW
Brahms With All But The Frailty
February 25, 2001
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By Michelle Dulak
It's a critical commonplace that the sorts of programs appropriate to a recital and to a CD are quite different. In a live recital (the line goes), the key is variety — of styles, of periods, of composers. Concentrate too narrowly on any one slice of the repertory, and not only will you bore your audience, but you won't show them all that you can do. Recordings, by contrast, should be designed to fit neatly into the consumers' CD libraries, so the more homogeneous the program, the better. I can't count the number of times I've seen a fine CD recital by a violinist or a cellist or (most frequently) a string quartet disparaged in the musical press simply because it contained a mixed program such as the musicians might have played in concert rather than a convenient slice of a single composer's output.
There are signs, though, that the wall between "recital programs" and "CD programs" is being eroded on both sides. The recorded "mixed" recital is much more popular now than it was even a few years ago. (The powerful examples of violinists Anne-Sophie Mutter and Gidon Kremer, I suspect, have something to do with this.) And single-composer live recitals are also proliferating, with Mutter (with her three-concert traversal of the Beethoven sonatas) again in the forefront. Last spring, Hilary Hahn and Garrick Ohlsson presented the complete Brahms works for violin and piano in Saratoga. Violinist Matthew Reichert and pianist Daniel Glover played the same program Sunday afternoon on Old First Concert's fine recital series at Old First Church in San Francisco.
Reichert, a Dorothy DeLay pupil, is a player to watch. His sound is dark, vibrant, ringing, and startlingly powerful, and he could move from one string to another with scarcely a change in tone color. (I think he was helped here by what must be an extraordinarily fine violin — I wish that the program notes had named it.) He played from memory, with no slips at all as far as I could tell, and with the greatest confidence and ease. Such technical imperfections as there were were tiny and fleeting, sounding more like momentary lapses of concentration than actual difficulties. The one exception was the perilous last "thirds-passage" in the second movement of the D Minor Sonata, where Reichert's insecurity was clear. Daniel Glover, the pianist, clearly had the music in hand, but his contribution all too often sounded unclear and muffled. Some of the problem doubtless was due to the muting of the piano (the lid was up only on the shortest stick), but Glover also used the pedal to excess. Nevertheless, he tracked Reichert expertly, and he had Brahms' exacting piano parts well under his fingers. What other listeners might have thought of this recital would depend very much on their interpretive priorities. I was in awe of Reichert's poise, of his facility, and especially of the depth and beauty of his sound. But I missed the kind of vulnerability, even frailty, that suffuses the greatest Brahms performances — the sense that the performer is in some way carrying a burden too great to bear.
Reichert favors the lower positions, only occasionally venturing up into the upper reaches of the low strings. And he disdains portamento — the few slides he dared were half-hearted and cold. There was nothing in his performance like the ecstatic playing with colors and inflections of the violinists of a half-century ago — which is hardly Reichert's fault, of course. Sturdy and reliable Brahms is what today's market rewards. But, oh, for a risk, for a mere suspicion of peril, for some vision of perfection all the more precious because it's so very distant! Playing Brahms has gotten too easy. I begin to think that the instrumentalists should get together with the Lieder singers and relearn how very difficult this music is. Reichert obliged the clamorous audience with one encore — the slow movement of Bruch's first violin concerto, in an intense and impressive performance. When the audience seemed to be demanding further encores, Glover explained that Reichert had to leave, to play the whole Bruch Concerto (with the Contra Costa Chamber Orchestra) at the Dean Lesher Center in Walnut Creek a few hours later. Some amazing fortitude, that — to play "the complete Brahms" in the afternoon and a concerto in the evening. Reichert certainly seemed equipped for the task. (Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.) ©2001 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved |
