Fame to Come

When a young string player reaches the level of fame that can support a recital tour, he or she generally has to cast about for a suitable duo partner. Rare is the cellist or violinist who attains star appeal with a recital partnership ready-formed, given that the becoming-a-star part of the process tends to involve a lot of concerto playing and woodshedding and not much else. In that sense, the young Armenian violinist Sergey Khachatryan, who presented a program of Bach, Brahms, and Shostakovich to a capacity audience at Berkeley's Hertz Hall Sunday afternoon, has the same leg up that Yehudi Menuhin and Gil Shaham had before him: a long-time duo partner in the shape of an exceptionally gifted sister-pianist. Lusine Khachatryan, on Sunday's showing, is on a par with her brother. The Khachatryan siblings have visited the Bay Area before (and Sergey has also played the Mendelssohn and the Khachaturian violin concertos here within the last few years), but this was their Cal Performances debut. If the presenter's usual instinct for sticking to a good thing doesn't desert it, they'll be back. Sergey Khachatryan's announced program included Bach's C-Major Solo Sonata, BWV 1005, by common assent the most demanding piece among the six sonatas and partitas. In the event, to my initial disappointment, he played the better-known D-Minor Partita (BWV 1004) instead. I say "initial" because it was hard to remain disappointed far into his account of the piece. Khachatryan's was "traditionalist" Bach in the sense that he didn't feel compelled to pretend that he was playing a Baroque instrument. He avoided fussy nonvibrato, rolled chords, helter-skelter tempos, and ornamentation. He took first repeats only (when was the last time you heard a violinist do that in Bach?), and, in the Ciaccona, he used a realization of the arpeggios that I've scarcely heard since the old Heifetz recording I grew up with. (Leopold Auer's edition, maybe?) All the same, this wasn't defiantly "oldstyle" playing either. It was neither polemically small nor defensively large, merely pitched at the violinist's equivalent of an ordinary speaking voice, and modulated with a corresponding naturalness. Technically it was near-flawless playing — squeaky clean in the passagework and the chords, and perfectly tuned. Still, it was the human sense of scale that impressed me most. (It can't have hurt that he was playing in Hertz Hall rather than the grander Zellerbach. If he keeps playing like this, though, he won't have that luxury on his next Cal Performances visit. As it was, the hall was packed.) Khachatryan used his repeat scheme imaginatively. The first time through the first half of each dance was fairly bold, the second sotto voce, as though remembered and elaborated. Then the second half (which he played only once) would partake of both characters, as though the two versions of the first half had between them opened out the interpretive space. As for the Ciaccona, Khachatryan's was as carefully shaped as any I've heard, but again with that feeling of natural delivery. The big arcs (like the huge arpeggiated passage that ends at the maggiore) swung and sang without any sense of artifice.

A Well-Matched Pair

The violinist's elder sister then joined him for the first Brahms sonata, the G-Major Op. 78. Lusine Khachatryan matches her brother well musically; she has the same rhythmic verve (she made the most of Brahms' cross-rhythms wherever she found them) and the same variety and delicacy of articulation. Together they made a most affecting thing of the Brahms. There was a fragile quality to much of the playing, a gentleness, that's unusual to hear in Brahms but uncommonly apt to this work. At the end of the first movement's development comes a moment when the music seems almost to grind to a halt, and the violin, searching halfheartedly, suddenly seems to glimpse home from afar and rushes with new hope in its direction (Brahms puts in an accelerando). The Khachatryans were perfect here, running toward the recapitulation eagerly and then just slipping into it with the tiniest relaxation of relief. Elsewhere the duo was ardent, impetuous, but always chamber-scaled. Once again I wondered how they would manage this in a major hall. In Hertz, though, the scale was ideal, and the piece emerged not as the pale younger sister of the other two, more demonstrative sonatas but as a thing apart. The Shostakovich Violin Sonata, music history's grimmest birthday present (to David Oistrakh, on his 60th), seems to be cropping up more often on recital programs lately. The preferred vehicle for expressing your capacity for nervy, angstvoll virtuosity remains Prokofiev's F-Minor Sonata, but the Shostakovich is fast catching up. (Of course, you can always do as the young British violinist Chloe Hanslip does in her upcoming San Francisco Performances recital, and put them both on the same program.) It is not ingratiating music, even by the bleak standards of late Shostakovich. But there's an icy poetry in the bare piano octaves, the isolated pizzicatos, the shivering tremolos, and the eerie 16th-note passage — shimmering in the violin's highest register — that appears toward the end of the first movement and whispers back into the last. The second-movement Scherzo is like the one in the Viola Sonata, savage without the leaven of humor, and the last movement is one of Shostakovich's characteristic Passacaglias, only this time with a theme so attenuated that it's easy to lose track of it. The Khachatryans' performance emphasized the texture's spareness, while there was something desperately human in the players' occasional outbursts of real rage. The violinist's short, sharp bow strokes didn't have the implacable neatness of Oistrakh's, varying from a sardonic lightness to a not-always-controlled ferocity. When he flew high up the lower strings at the beginning of the second movement, his instrument snarled like a feral cat. His sister, meanwhile, erupted in her third-movement cadenza with blinding force. The duo offered two encores. The violinist's announcement of the first — an arrangement of an Armenian folksong by his near-namesake, the composer Aram Khachaturian — was met by a burst of applause from, at a guess, the Armenian emigré section of the audience. It proved to be a sly, augmented-second-laden tune subjected to a few fetching variations, played with subtle wit and a teasing inflection. For the next, Khachatryan told us only, "I think you will recognize this one." Yep: It was a slithery, sultry account of Heifetz's arrangement of Gershwin's It Ain't Necessarily So.