It's one of the quirks of the music business that star players tend to get locked into playing and recording only the most familiar repertoire, at least early in stardom. Look at the trajectory of any young violinist signed by a major label (if, that is, you can find one). The new star's first order of business is getting the Mendelssohn and the Tchaikovsky and
Tzigane and
Symphonie espagnole and the like safely to bed;
then — providing they’re still around, 10 years or so on — they can think about exploring less-played music, if so inclined.
Judging by the printed program for Sunday's recital at Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, Gil Shaham is over the standard-repertoire hump and free to play whatever he wants. Judging by the recital itself, he, and we, were not only about to visit some unexpected places but going to have a good deal of fun doing it.
Sunday's Cal Performances-sponsored concert, in which Shaham was partnered with the excellent and articulate pianist Akira Eguchi, found the violinist, still in his mid-30s, ducking into some dusty corners of the repertoire and emerging with rare finds.
William Walton's 1949 Violin Sonata turns up occasionally on disc (the San Francisco Symphony's Yukiko Kurakata, née Kamei, once made a fine recording), but this is the first time I've heard the piece in recital. It's in two movements, the second a set of pithy, sharply characterized variations. It features the mobile, yearning sort of string writing you find in Walton's music of around the same time, like the String Quartet (1947) or the Cello Concerto (1956) — lyrical lines full of expressive leaps à la Barber, but with a pervasive fidgetiness, as well.
It suited Shaham down to the ground. His isn't a huge sound, but it's exceptionally clear and sweet, with a narrow vibrato that makes the purity of the intonation unmistakable. His left-hand technique is clean and very light, his bowing fleet and airy (he's a fast-bow man, sort of the anti-Hilary Hahn). It's a rather Francophone violinistic profile, despite Shaham's mostly American pedagogical pedigree, and it fitted the French-tinged sound-world of the Walton uncommonly well.
Rescuing a Reclusive Sonata
If the concert-opening Walton counts as a neglected work, Joaquin Rodrigo's 1966
Sonata pimpante ("pimpante" meaning "lively, energetic") is better described as an abandoned one. On the face of it, it's difficult to understand why. Who
wouldn't want a compact three-movement parcel of sunshine, crammed with tunes, slyly sultry, uncomplicatedly flashy, yet not all that difficult to play?
Maybe Rodrigo's pigeonholed place as a guitar composer is to blame, or perhaps it's the relative difficulty of getting hold of the music. (Rodrigo's copyrights are split among a number of publishers, but this work belongs to a smallish Spanish firm whose catalog isn't much encountered here.)
Whatever the cause, it's too bad. Perceptibly Spanish-sounding violin music with actual musical backbone to it isn't thick enough on the ground for violinists to keep ignoring a piece like this. The harmonic idiom is mildly pungent — on the order of Stravinsky's
Suite Italienne, maybe — and the tunes are beguiling. Meanwhile there are enough notes in both parts to give an impression of great brilliance, though, as far as I could tell, everything is laid out with great convenience for the violinist, so that it isn't remotely as difficult as it sounds.
The players relished the flashy stuff — the cascades and whirling scales of the first movement, the double-stopped high jinks of the last — and Shaham crooned the lyrical sections alluringly.
The program notes credit the Rodrigo's finale with "almost Paganini-like virtuoso brilliance." In one sense that's truer even than the note-writer evidently noticed, since the movement pointedly quotes Paganini's
La campanella more than once. All the same, for true virtuoso Spanishry we had to wait for the Sarasate set that followed the Rodrigo on the second half. Shaham and Eguchi cannily stayed onstage after their bows post-Rodrigo, obviously anxious to launch into Sarasate's
Zapateado before the memory of the Rodrigo's finale had faded. Whaddaya know: same tempo, same manner, same keys, same almost everything.
Zapateado is an order of magnitude more difficult, what with the artificial harmonics, the left-hand pizzicatos, and so on. Shaham danced through it and its companions,
Romanza andaluza and the inevitable
Zigeunerweisen, with the kind of mischievous swagger that papers over the odd squeak or misstep.
(I have an idea that one particularly notorious passage in
Zigeunerweisen, a fearsome gantlet of alternated bowed and plucked notes, was brought off largely through pure bravado. Shaham sailed through it, all whirring bow and fingers, and right in tempo, too, but even from my close seat I couldn't hear many of the actual pitches.)
Enticing Tunes Played Winningly
Shaham is dynamite in this material. Granted, he wasn't the last word in raging hot-bloodedness, and if you simply must have your Sarasate reeking of the bullring, you might have been a shade disappointed. But give me Shaham's magical dexterity and his effortlessly singing line every time. It was particularly good to hear
Romanza andaluza, a blithe string of irresistible tunes that's not impossible enough to get played much.
The odd piece out Sunday was Bach's A-Minor Solo Sonata (BWV 1003), which followed the Walton on the first half — not only because it was far removed in time and place from everything else, but also because alone of the pieces on the program it didn't seem tailor-made for Shaham. Not that he sounded at all ill at ease. It was strong, confident, aggressively no-nonsense Bach, immaculately played and resolutely chilly.
Modern-instrument players deal with the existence of period-instrument Bach in various ways. One is to be defiantly old-school, romantic, which can be fun as well as instructive; it behooves us to remember that the old school, however wrong we may have come to feel it, included an awful lot of titanic geniuses of the instrument. Another way is to try to mimic period style with modern equipment. This once had reliably ghastly results, but things have improved in recent years, as modern players have stopped trying to follow imagined rules of Baroque playing and started actually listening to what their period colleagues are doing.
Shaham, by and large, did neither. There wasn't anything identifiably period in his playing, apart from the minimal use of vibrato. In particular, he didn't parse the music into short phrases much, or work to differentiate contrapuntal lines. The second-movement fugue ran by more or less on a single level, with entrances of the subject not set off from each other, while in the slow third movement, the throbbing bass eighth notes didn't quite seem like a line in their own right. The first movement had neither the period player's sense of a rich arabesque wrought over a bare framework of chords, nor the old-school feeling of a stream-of-consciousness meditation. It all seemed a little flat.
Shaham played a single cleverly chosen encore: Brahms's fourth
Hungarian Dance, which smoked as if the excess Gypsy energy left over at the end of
Zigeunerweisen had needed somewhere to go.