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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Lauma Skride
February 17, 2007
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Sister Act By Michelle Dulak Thomson
Violinist Baiba Skride's San Francisco Performances debut on Saturday was one of those concerts whose program was almost too wonderful to be credible. You do not often get to hear Ravel's Sonata alongside his Tzigane; getting Alfred Schnittke's First Sonata and Karol Szymanowski's Mythes thrown in was such an excess of riches that the Beethoven sonata opening the program almost felt like an afterthought.
It turns out it wasn't, but listeners weren't to know that until they had heard it. Nor could they have guessed that Lauma Skride, the violinist's younger sister and her accompanist on this outing, is a player almost on a par with her more famous sibling. The audience at the Florence Gould Theater on Saturday will be lucky to hear another such recital in the next decade.
Whether by accident or design, elaborate uses of artificial harmonics were a running theme in this recital, from the remarkable passage at the end of the Schnittke sonata's slow movement to the more outré ones in the outer movements of the Szymanowski Mythes to the yet-flashier ones in Tzigane. Baiba Skride, it has to be said, plays harmonics magnificently, and she could hardly have chosen a better program to show off that particular skill.
But then, she plays nearly everything else magnificently, as well. Hers is not, granted, a style to gratify all tastes. The keynotes of her playing are short, crisp bowstrokes and unexpected hushes. Both are things she does exceedingly well, and both are things that could get irritating mighty rapidly.
On Saturday, though, it was just all to the good. Baiba Skride has a deep and luminous violin tone that managed to be fascinating in all sorts of contexts. The opening Beethoven sonata (Op. 12, No. 3) saw her in terrific form: lithe, witty, consistently inflecting her part in interesting ways, and always engaged with her sister at the piano. It was a performance to make me regret that she evidently took the remainder of the program to be her true metier. Judging by the results, though, I can hardly blame her. The Schnittke First Sonata, for once, made sense. Szymanowski's hypererotic Mythes soared. Ravel's Sonata got a performance that didn't err on the side either of overindulgence or of coldness. And his Tzigane can seldom have been played that cleanly or with that degree of proud confidence. The encore was a natty, sharply turned Kreisler Tambourin chinois. The Skride Manner might have been designed precisely for that piece. Certainly, I've never heard it either so neat or so fun.
(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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