Violinist Aleksey Igudesman performing at the Theaterhaus Stuttgart in Germany (from his Wikimedia Commons Web page, photograph by Alexander Blum, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license)
Last night violinist Aleksey Igudesman returned to Davies Symphony Hall. His last appearance was almost exactly a decade ago, when he was performing in a duo with pianist Hyung-ki Joo. It would be fair to say that their mission was to explore the comic side of “serious” music.
His return to Davies was a much more extended offering. With violin in hand, he also conducted the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) for the performance of a comedy with music entitled The Music Critic. The only dramatic role in this offering was the title one, taken by John Malkovich.
The selections performed by SFS were relatively short in duration. Nevertheless, they covered a wide span of music history with a keyboard prelude by Johann Sebastian Bach (reworked as accompaniment for “Ave Maria”) at one end and a tango composed by Igudesman at the other. Most of the selections were “played straight;” but I have to confess that my sympathies were won over to Malkovich when Igudesman began conducting the first movement of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 13, his first symphony in D minor. After only a few minutes, Malkovich shouted “Shut up!”
As the program progressed, I found myself wondering if Igudesman’s approach to criticism had been inspired by one of my favorite books. For those that have not yet already guessed, that book was the Lexicon of Musical Invective, written by Nicolas Slonimsky. This goes hand-in-hand with my equally favorite quotation by Johannes Brahms: “If there is anyone here whom I have not insulted, I beg his pardon.” Both Brahms and Slonimsky were clearly winking at their readers. Malkovich and Igudesman recognized those winks and took them as the ideal point of departure for last night’s performance.
That said, SFS did justice to most of the music, which was “played straight.” They were attentive to Igudesman’s leadership, and he knew how to maintain that attention. Thus, while there was no end of raucous humor, there were also quieter moments during which we could reflect on why listening to music can be such an enjoyable experience.
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