|
RECITAL REVIEW
January 22, 2005
|
By Michelle Dulak Thomson
At Old First Concerts, the audiences often aren't near the size the performances deserve, so it was gratifying to see a hefty
turnout for San Francisco Opera concertmaster Kay Stern and pianist Joan Nagano Saturday afternoon. They knew what they were about,
for the duo's eclectic and wide-ranging recital was a marvel both of program planning and of musicianship.
Theirs was a program distinctly in the old style, despite the presence of some very unfamiliar music: a Baroque sonata to open,
some short and attractive bon-bons, one big sonata, and a virtuoso zinger to close. Old-style too was the positioning on stage,
with Stern tucked into the crook of the piano and facing away from Nagano. That didn't result (rather to my surprise) in any
ensemble problems — Nagano followed Stern with remarkable acuity — but "followed" is the operative word; certainly the
setup reinforced the impression of a violin recital with piano accompaniment (rather than a violin-piano duo recital) that the
playing itself bore out.
Stern is the very unusual concertmaster who doesn't play like a concertmaster. That is, her playing hasn't been coarsened and
thickened by the constant pressure to project. There was no bluster in Saturday's recital, there were no extra bows for big effect,
just the same lithe, quicksilver musical personality all through.
Indeed, hers was about the most attractive violin playing I've heard in years. She makes a big sound, but not an outsized one;
there's no sense of gritty effort behind it, and indeed she seems to have some mysterious art of drawing a slowish bow while making
the same light, clear, open sound one associates with a fast one. Her vibrato is fast, but narrow and varied; her intonation is
remarkably pure and secure; and she moves around the instrument with enviable ease. And everything she does is stylish — not
mannered, not exaggerated, just unfailingly "right." It's the kind of playing that, as a somewhat hopeless conservatory kid looking
up at my betters, I used to call "musical." On reflection, maybe that's still the best word for it.
The opening Pergolesi sonata (the E-major one whose finale Stravinsky used for the finale of Pulcinella) Stern played with a dash and elegance not common in modern-instrument players doing Baroque music these days. It was matched at the other end of the program by the rondo from Mozart's Haffner Serenade, in Kreisler's arrangement. Stern announced this (as did the program) as a Rondo by Kreisler on a theme of Mozart. In fact it really is almost all Mozart, apart from the Eingänge (lead-ins to the rondo theme), which Kreisler makes into increasingly elaborate cadenzas. But Stern played it, charmingly, as though it really were a Kreisler pastische, slowing up indulgently for the second theme and even more for the closing one, and tossing off the cadenzas with magnificent bravado. In between was music of a kind you don't often find now on a violin recital, partly because it's unfamiliar and partly because it's light. Glazunov's sweet, silken Meditation, which followed the Pergolesi, is at least an occasional program item, but the selections from Bohuslav Martinu's Etudes rhythmiques just after it are decidedly not. They ought to be, though; the three Stern and Nagano played (out of what's evidently a set of seven) were brief, attractive, and fun, especially the sassy, syncopated No. 6, which Stern tossed off with irresistable insouciance. After came another rarity, Saint-Saëns' Op. 136 Triptyque, also sweet and lively by turns. Anyone expecting something exotic or even faux-exotic out of its central "Vision Congolaise" would have been disappointed. There wasn't a lot of Congo (real or imagined) in there beyond a couple bars of weird chromaticism towards the end; otherwise it was about as exotic as a Schumann Romance, and really rather like one (no bad thing). The finale of the set, "Joyeuseté," was the joyous scamper you'd expect from the title. And then there was the Franck Sonata, the one real duo on the program and the one in which the recitalist-and-accompanist model most came to grief. Stern was amazing, ranging freely from ineffable sweetness to steely power with no apparent strain. But Nagano spent the entire work in the background, a peculiar position for a fine pianist with a monster part in front of her and a piano with lid full up to work with. She was elegant, graceful, tactful, and scarcely there, an approach that worked after a fashion in the rest of the program, but was more or less lethal in the Franck. It was puzzling.
(Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America,
and The New York Times.)
|
Kay Stern
Joan Nagano