San Francisco Classical Voice

Strauss and McCray also brought the right touch to the middle Blues movement, with a clear sense that Ravel was adopting the new sound of jazz for his own expressive means. While they brought plenty of energy to Ravel's sliding violin lines and the quasi-stride piano writing, they never exaggerated the "jazziness" of the music. Instead, they captured the character of the writing, a kind of tightly controlled jauntiness.

The concluding Perpetuum Mobile was appropriately dazzling and especially provided a showcase for Strauss's abilities. He plays with a full, attractive sound, and makes every note sing. He also has a deep sensitivity for the feeling of the music he's playing. Even in this horserace of a movement, he modulated its mood, from intense to light to lyrical.

Though all the pieces on the program qualified as major works, John Corigliano's Sonata for Violin and Piano is the least-known of the three. Written in 1963, when he was only twenty-five, its presence provided a valuable insight into this composer's origins. Not surprisingly, as the work of a gifted composer trying to find his voice, the Sonata sums up a lot of the music he must have been hearing in his early years. There's much of the Russian musical sarcasm of Prokofiev and Shostakovich. There's even more of the boldness, dramatic gestures, and lyricism of Bernstein and the generation that preceded him: Copland, Harris, Schuman.

However easy it is to spot the influences, this is also a genuinely affecting work, propelled by Corigliano's gift as a melodist and a convincing development in each of the four movements. The second movement, marked Andantino, was a highlight, with a plaintiveness in the violin that brought Copland to mind. The piano writing was beautifully served by McCray's ability to find different colors in the piano, from the distant but clear playing that supported the most lyrical violin lines, to the commanding chordal passages that animated the middle of the movement.

Aside from the very ending of the piece, which crossed the line from a virtuosic coda to an endurance test, this piece is often moving and beautiful. Programming three works in the same form calls for comparison, of course, and Corigliano's callowness stood out against the similar approach of Ravel's concluding movement, in which the mature composer knew exactly where to stop. Listening to this work on the whole, though, there's a quality of longing, shaded by darkness, that often touches this music. After hearing this early piece, I stopped to consider how much of Corigliano's later music is focused upon glittering surfaces without much beneath them. It seems a shame that his expressive abilities haven't always been brought into play as his formidable technical command has grown.

Strauss and McCray brought this rich program to an end with a heartfelt performance of Richard Strauss' Sonata of 1887, a youthful work that made a nice parallel to the Corigliano in its evidence of early gifts and hints of what was to come. There is an abundance of loveliness in the melodic writing here, and a fluent command of the mercurial harmonic language of the late 19th century. The musicians made the most of the work, as they met its test of individual and ensemble virtuosity. Both short sections and whole movements were shaped gracefully, and the playing was always soulful.

After the restrained expression of the Ravel, though, and the complex moods of Corigliano's Sonata, Strauss' sort of generalized Romantic longing for transcendence and tendency toward big pronouncements were far less moving than the evening's earlier music. Paradoxically, a more touching piece than the Sonata was the duo's brief encore, Strauss' song ”Allerseelen,” Op.10 No.9. Dating from the same period, it shares the Sonata's quality of striving for the sublime. But the feelings took on a more noble and believable character when expressed more succinctly, and Strauss and McCray gave it the same care as the rest of program.