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RECITAL REVIEW
March 4, 2003
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By Michelle Dulak
A certain school of opinion holds that Pinchas Zukerman should early on have recognized his true calling as a violist and given up all those comparative frivolities of violin-playing and (latterly) conducting. Sunday's recital at Davies Symphony Hall can't have been designed to further that impression. But of the three Brahms sonatas he and longtime recital partner Marc Neikrug played, it was the one for viola that made a case for Zukerman as a great musician.
A fellow listener remarked to me after the concert that Zukerman's sound was amazingly deep and full, especially in "that second piece." Well, yes. That second piece was the Sonata Op. 120/2, originally for clarinet but published simultaneously in Brahms' own viola version. Brahms moved a lot of material down an octave from the clarinet original in his transcription, but most violists these days move it all back up; it sounds more impressive and projects better in the higher octave. Zukerman, though, played the original viola version, where a lot of the most important material is on the middle strings. I think only violists will fully appreciate the insolent confidence implied in playing that version in a hall the size of Davies, next to a fine pianist who has the lid full up. Take it from us: to do that you have to be very silly, very brave, very strong, or all three.
Zukerman was neither silly nor brave. The man simply wrings incredible sound out of an instrument with no apparent effort. (From what looked like a very small viola too — my seat-neighbor who mistook it for a violin made a very understandable mistake.) And in the E-flat Sonata the sound was really enough. I'd heard Kim Kashkashian play the same work a little over a week before, and she was all nuance and breath and phrase and trajectory and moment-to-moment drama and sheer going-for-it. Zukerman was all sound.
It was perfectly clear which was the more interesting musician. But that sound was something; that sound was something, in fact, that a violist might kill for. Rich and dark and magnificent and so powerful that you were apt to forget that the performance itself wasn't actually that interesting. That magic didn't work for the surrounding violin sonatas — the A major, Op. 100, and the D minor, Op. 108. On the violin, Zukerman seemed just a guy with an incredible technique, a very powerful sound, and no musical aims beyond a vague idea of showing those powers off. If he had had a cheap sense of theater, the kind "serious" musicians are not supposed to have, actual fun might have occurred. We had no such luck. It certainly wasn't "bad" playing; it was just inconsequent. All the elements of drama were there. Sometimes even drama itself was there — the place in the first movement of the D-minor Sonata, for example, where the music turns abruptly to F-sharp minor, and the violinist moves swiftly to the new key, with three great slashing strokes that Zukerman (amazingly) took all up-bow.
But he did so little to further the drama in other ways. He never dared play really softly, for example; there was no menace in the quietly creeping passages of the D-minor's first movement. The scherzo of the same piece was leaden, every note plush and plump, undermining Neikrug's delicate account of the piano part. (The scherzando bits of the A-major Sonata's middle movement were much the same.) More puzzling was Zukerman's slighting of the obvious "big moments," places that cried out for a great climax that he was obviously able to supply if he'd wanted to. Take the run up to the last bunch of thirds in the D-minor Sonata's slow movement — the top of that phrase ought to be a triumph, the tallest of many cresting waves, but Zukerman didn't make it so. The thirds were, of course, beautiful and impeccably in tune. But what was the point? The encores, strangely, were the only place in the recital (apart from the viola sonata) where Zukerman seemed to connect entirely with the music. The first of Schumann's Fantasiestücke (originally for clarinet) was plaintive and poignant. And Maria Theresa von Paradis' Sicilienne, which followed, was played very beautifully in the manner of a Kreisler salon piece. It's actually more than a hundred years older than that, but I doubt anyone listening would rather have heard it played as Zukerman would play Mozart. It was sweet, tender, and touching.
(Michelle Dulak, editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, 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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Pinchas Zukerman