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RECITAL REVIEW
March 4, 2005
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By Michelle Dulak Thomson
Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg is one of those musicians whose reputations really do precede them. The audience Friday night at Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall seemed equally divided between the curious and the convinced. At least, at the end of the recital, there was the strangest half-standing-ovation I've seen: roughly half the audience enthusiastically on its feet, the other half rather ostentatiously planted in its seats.
A great deal has been made, over the years, of Salerno-Sonnenberg's "grimaces" and physical extravagances. Bay Area chamber-music audiences have likely seen some gesturing from a few noted local artists (who needn't be named here) beside which Salerno-Sonnenberg's look like pale imitations, but it's true that she does sort of lurch at the violin in her more excited moments.
The trouble is that the lurching is musical as well as physical. Salerno-Sonnenberg's signature tic is a wide, fast, generally-a-shade-over-the-pitch vibrato that gets applied seemingly arbitrarily to particular pitches whenever she plays legato above a piano dynamic. Some notes get the vibrato, some don't — and the ones that do also get a helpful dynamic swell at the same time so that you're sure to notice. It's a manner she's had ever since her earliest recordings, twenty years ago or more, and the most irritating thing about it is that it seems to be completely aimless. She doesn't appear to be making a point against the old singing "legato line" of previous generations; she doesn't, in fact, seem to be making any point at all, just (in more senses than one) a buzz.
The last time I heard a duo play a Mozart sonata in Zellerbach, it was Hilary Hahn and Natalie Zhu. Salerno-Sonnenberg is about as far from Hahn as you can get on the artistic spectrum. (If they ever meet, I would rather not be present, because there's apt to be a large explosion and a deep crater afterwards, as tends to happen when matter and anti-matter collide.) Hahn's Mozart was all crisp discipline and steely determination and what its friends call "intellectual rigor" and its foes "totally not getting the point." Salerno-Sonnenberg's, in the late B-flat Sonata, K. 454, was all isolated effects, in no particular sequence. No one, certainly, could accuse her of imposing her granitic persona on the piece, unless we're talking granite in a molten state. The peculiarly maddening nature of the performance lay in its occasionally lapsing almost accidentally into something quite beautiful, and then snatching it away again a couple bars later. Salerno-Sonnenberg really has a very fine technique, and a seductive sound in the quieter dynamics (where she's less inclined to pump up the vibrato), and there were soft legato passages in the Mozart that were quite breathtaking. The problem was that after a few minutes you'd schooled yourself not to enjoy them too much, because you knew you'd be brought back to earth with a large thump within fifteen seconds. The same went for the Brahms D-minor Sonata (Op. 108), which ended the formal program. Even in the opening bars, the surges of vibrato were everywhere. The opening of the development left few opportunities for them, and was consequently the best-played thing in the first movement. But in the lovely slow movement they were back with a vengeance, taking over even the quiet opening, never mind the stronger reprise. The Scherzo after that was heavy-handed, and even the finale — which is certainly prime Salerno-Sonnenberg territory — suffered from occasional virulent attacks of The Swoons. Once again, it was frustrating, because so much was good amidst so much that was, well, daft. Salerno-Sonnenberg's bowing is very fine, not just in "attack mode" (as at the begining of the Brahms's finale), but also in quiet legato, and also (as we found out elsewhere) in spiccato and sautillé. Her left-hand technique is rock-solid; she played the treacherous thirds in the Brahms slow movement as firmly as I've heard them live. And she had a superb partner in Anne-Marie McDermott, who played the whole program with a combination of dexterity, clarity, and depth of sound that worked as well in Brahms as it did in Mozart.
Or in Francis Poulenc, whose wartime Sonata came before intermission. Salerno-Sonnenberg and McDermott here indulged in one of those pointless apologias of the "please don't hate this piece even though it's really ugly" variety that are on my short list of Things That Ought To Disappear. How helpful is it to tell the audience up front that "very few people know this piece, and even fewer like it"? Or that the score repeatedly demands "violence," so "honestly it's not just us"? Actually, the duo did a rather better-than-average job of the apologia as these things go, overkill and all (Salerno-Sonnenberg on the finale: "The Russian circus comes to town, only they're all on speed"; McDermott's favorite adjective seemed to be "psychotic"). But why they thought they needed to explain elaborately to a Bay Area audience that the music they were about to hear might have some nasty sounds in it I don't know. The Poulenc has its astringent moments, but it's nothing that needs the musicians' equivalent of an R rating. Actually, it's a strong and interesting piece. I suspect it owes its obscurity partly to being just too clichéd Poulenc in the suave lyrical bits ("how many times can we take four bars and replay them a whole step down?"), and partly to the finale's being damned difficult — not just the moto perpetuo, but the thirds and the other technical obstacles. And here again Salerno-Sonnenberg was in fine technical form, especially in the parts that she could (nearly literally) sink her teeth into, but also at the opening of the slow movement, where for once she showed real restraint and almost gentleness. The encores were a Kreisler waltz in which the duo exaggerated every dynamic shift to grotesque effect, and then the finale of the E-major Bach Sonata, BWV 1016, turned into an elfin moto perpetuo by being played about a quarter again as fast as I've ever heard it. At least, the violin playing was elfin (an incredible scurrying sautillé); the piano playing was merely as light and nimble as it could reasonably be at the speed.
(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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Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg
Anne-Marie McDermott