San Francisco Classical Voice

The technical achievement even by itself is something extraordinary. I am convinced that Vengerov is the technical equal of anyone now playing the instrument. His tone is deep and intense, even and solid at any dynamic, startlingly powerful at full blast. His intonation is pure and his accuracy (with both hands) pretty near perfect. To the Ysaÿe sonatas he brought a particular combination of assets that I don't think I've heard in such degree from anyone else. He balances every double-stop evenly between the two notes, and can move from one to the next (however difficult the shift) without the least break in the line. Then, too, his bowing technique is such as to enable almost any effect, from the sharpest accent to the most supple change of direction. A purely conventional performance of the Ysaÿe sonatas fashioned with tools like these would already be a thing to marvel at.

But of course those tools were not so used Sunday night. Have Ysaÿe's sonatas ever before had so much sheer imagination lavished on them? I doubt it. They are strange, rich pieces, suffused with fantasy, the kind that repay a player's own fantasy threefold. But they do work well enough as ordinary showpieces. And as they're also damned difficult, they tend to be played mostly by ordinary-showpiece-players.

Vengerov's first commercial recording (made in 1989 for the Biddulph label, a bit before his fifteenth birthday) includes a fine performance of the most popular of the Ysaÿe Sonatas — the "Ballade," No. 3. (By this time Vengerov had been playing the piece already for about a third of his life; Sunday he remarked casually that he'd first performed it at age ten.) Out of curiosity I listened to that old recording again after the concert. That performance — already technically immaculate, already cunningly shaped — would do credit to nearly every living violinist, and a lot of its contours were still there in Sunday's performance.

But how much deeper and more interesting the latter was! The main theme's menace, the central section's mystery, the violence and the poetry of the piece alike, were all of a different order — not merely from the teenage Vengerov's first effort, but from any other performance I've heard, on record or off. In places it was violent, almost brutal, full of harsh accents and a harsher sautillé, and ending with a final brusque, precipitous barrage of chords. But most of the time Sunday's performance allowed itself more space than that early one. What stick most in the memory are those fragrant, lingering chromatic arabesques from the middle of the piece. The teenage Vengerov had a trained virtuoso's rhetorical sense (already honed even at that age by many years of public performance) of how and when to take time. Sunday's Vengerov seemed to take time for the pure pleasure of it.

Just a somewhat more mature, more duplicitous rhetoric? I don't think so. I could swear that Vengerov's minute delight in every detail of the "Ballade," and of the other sonatas that preceded and followed it, was real. He loves these pieces, and you know it immediately the moment the music leaves off conventional bravura and goes somewhere else. The fierce passages are merely (merely!) up to the highest virtuoso standard; the gentle and tender and mysterious and even puckish ones are beyond it, and I don't honestly know who could match him here.

How to name highlights, when the highlights are most of the program? Two among the other Ysaÿe Sonatas were the exquisite end of Sonata No. 4's middle movement — the arpeggios evaporating upwards into perfect artificial harmonics, and then a couple delicate pizzicati — and the middle of Sonata No. 6, where Vengerov's slyly insinuating tango rhythm got a chuckle even out of a San Francisco audience.

Shchedrin's "Echo Sonata" is one of those polystylistic monsters that the last years of the Soviet Union seemed to spawn in such quantity — pieces whose governing principle is "anything may happen now, so why not this?" Accordingly it runs all over the place, begging not-quite-quotations from here and there and, towards the end, throwing out whole chunks of three of the Bach solo-violin works (Vengerov disarmingly remarked that it would be "a quiz" for the audience). After that the violinist de-tunes his G string and the piece slumps back into silence.

It may be a gratuitous mess of a piece, but it's a hell of a good vehicle for Vengerov. He can handle all the technical side easily — which given Shchedrin's demands is saying a lot. (The Ysaÿe Sonatas at least make it obvious to the listener where they're difficult. Shchedrin is not so courteous. One passage involves bowed double-stops on the A and D strings, with a third stopped note on the G string as a left-hand pizzicato struck simultaneously. It sounded and even looked easy, but the mechanical difficulties are frightening. Compared to that, even the piece's blistering passages of sautillé look refreshingly straightforward to a violinist.)

Vengerov opened with the Toccata and Fugue arrangement. The idea is not as outlandish as it might look; there's long been speculation that the piece is either not originally by Bach, not originally for organ, or both. A lot of the figuration lies in such a way that it suggests a violin original, and in fact the baroque violinist Jaap Schröder issued his own solo violin "back-transcription" well over a decade ago.

For his recording (yes, there's already a CD corresponding to this tour) Vengerov used a baroque violin. When he came onstage Sunday bearing two bows and one instrument to begin the first half, I thought he had decided that using a baroque violin in Davies would be foolhardy, and was going to compromise by using the baroque bow but a modern fiddle. In fact, as he explained after playing the piece, he wanted to use the baroque fiddle, but it was "sick" — some seams had opened up. (Travel — particularly the sudden changes of humidity and temperature involved in air travel — is hell on old instruments.)

For this, and for the Adagio of the Bach G-minor Sonata that was his first encore, Vengerov used a baroque bow and tuned down to A415. It's a measure of his intense musical curiosity that he's the only first-rank "modern" player I've ever seen tackle "period" style who has come to understand remotely what it's about. Any number of internationally-renowned soloists are convinced that "baroque" style is light, airy, and detached, and to join the ranks of The Correct they play likewise. Vengerov's Bach was dark, intense, and largely legato — meaning that he hasn't been listening to third-hand descriptions of The Correct, but to actual period-instrument players, who sound a lot more like him than like most of the dessicated, rushed horrors passing for "historically-aware modern-instrument performance" these days. Vengerov is no fashion-monger and no dilettante; he takes the historical-performance idea seriously (to the point of having his first good violin "retrofitted" as a baroque instrument) and he understands it rightly, as a way to become more expressive in Bach, not less. And his eloquent G-minor Adagio was such as to make me hope he gets around to recording the Sonatas and Partitas. Soon.