From the Classical Vault Dept.: Again (as with last week), going back twenty years, I wrote about two back-to-back concerts that included an orchestra appearance at Proctor’s Theatre, something that now rarely happens at that venue. In any event, the violinist within me was thrilled. I’m a lousy player but a keen fan of the repertory.
TWO MAGNIFICENT VIOLINISTS appeared within two days of each other in Schenectady, in two significantly contrasting settings of music and hall. Young Arabella Steinbacher blazed through the dazzling Khachaturian concerto surrounded by a large orchestra and witnessed by some 2,000 concertgoers at Proctor’s; Jaime Laredo, a renowned artist with decades of performance credit, played the three autumnal Brahms sonatas in an emotionally riveting partnership with pianist Leon Fleisher in the more intimate setting of Union College’s Memorial Chapel.
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| Arabella Steinbacher Photo by Peter Rigaud |
Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto is a big and brassy trifle, replete with modal characteristics springing not only from the composer’s Armenian heritage but also with a fascination for Oriental sounds that found its way into music by Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakoff, among others.
Written in 1940 with lots of advice from violinist David Oistrakh, its fast outer movements are busy – the concluding Rondo is a feast of pyrotechnics – while its middle, an Andante, displays the lyricism that has attracted Khachaturian’s ballet music to hip filmmakers (the love theme from “The Hudsucker Proxy,” for example).Steinbacher’s bow arm is astonishingly versatile: she already has bested all of the big challenges. A supple legato is little challenge, yet she summons a creamy tone from frog to tip. When she sets it in more detached motion, for a staccato or bouncing spiccato, each note resounds clearly. And this concerto demands several long sequences of broken chords with a bouncing bow, which she articulated beautifully.
Otherwise, the piece is a lot of sound and fury, with a heart-on-the-sleeve sob story in its middle movement that needs to be played with the utmost conviction to avoid falling into parody. Perhaps, in that regard, it’s a young person’s work, and Steinbacher chose this vehicle well.
You can’t get more heart-on-the-sleeve than Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, a work that pushed him dangerously close to self-parody. Where the Fourth is a lyrical and fun, this one all shades of gloom, like being trapped in a bar with a garrulous, self-pitying drunk.
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| Jaime Laredo Photo by Christian Steiner |
This symphony demands taxing work from woodwinds and brass, with extended passages for solo clarinet and solo horn. Never was a note out of place, and Tortelier singled out the soloists and their sections for well-deserved bows.
The enthusiastic audience, nervous about applause, applauded any time the music stopped or even paused (as at the Tchaikovsky symphony’s false ending). I’m all for spontaneous displays of enthusiasm, but sometimes the continuity of a piece is ruined by the outburst. Too bad this kind of thing no longer is taught in schools, but, then again, no child will be left behind, right?
The first movement of Britten’s “Simple Symphony,” which opened the concert, was a little ragged, which I suspect was the result of trying to get the sound right in a large, almost-full hall, something you can’t achieve during a sound check; with the second movement, marked “Playful Pizzicato,” everything coalesced.
So the orchestra was primed and ready when Steinbacher took to the stage for her concerto. Khachaturian is not shy about answering a solo violin passage with a blast from the brass, and Tortelier saw to it that the violinist was never obscured and the work danced along with appropriate ferocity.
Ferocity is about the last term you’d apply to the three violin sonatas by Brahms. Written after the violin concerto, when the composer was in his mid-forties to mid-fifties, they are – especially the first two – quiet, meditative works that call for a skilled interplay between violin and piano.
Jaime Laredo is a virtuoso who is also one of the best chamber music artists on the scene, and is thus a generous collaborator. And to have Leon Fleisher as a partner is to have one of the shining lights of the keyboard, an artist whose career was derailed for decades by focal dystonia.
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| Leon Fleisher |
But what a compelling journey it was to get there! These sonatas are sinewy, well-crafted works. Not surprisingly, the composer borrowed from his own songs for thematic material – because the violin is the most singer-like instrument, and the best works for it are wordless arias.
Laredo has a sweet, Oistrakh-like tone; his slides up the strings reveal their motion with a small sob; his phrasing throbs with a momentous vibrato. Fleisher approaches the piano as if it’s a wild animal from which he needs to coax calmness; he studies the keys with a Brendel-like look of bemusement as he draws from them a richness of sound so ripe for Brahms. This was a perfect lesson in chamber music-making, a thrilling experience for this area.
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Yan Pascal Tortelier, conductor
Arabella Steinbacher, violinist
Proctor’s Theatre, March 21
Jaime Laredo, violinist
Leon Fleisher, pianist
Union College Memorial Chapel, March 23
– Metroland Magazine, 30 March 2006
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