Violinist Joshua Bell (from the Web page for last night’s recital)
Last night violinist Joshua Bell returned to San Francisco as the recitalist in the latest event in the Great Performers Series presented by the San Francisco Symphony. He was accompanied at the piano by Shai Wosner for a program of four violin sonatas, two each from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The composers for the first half of the program were Franz Schubert and Edvard Grieg, and those in the second half were Sergei Prokofiev and Maurice Ravel.
The program got off to an uneven start in which Bell and Wosner seem to have had different approaches to Schubert. Schubert has had a significant role in Wosner’s repertoire, and he has released several Onyx Classics albums of that composer’s piano music. On the other hand, I am not sure that I have had an opportunity to listen to Bell play Schubert previously. Last night I could see why, since Bell never seemed to find the right way to fit himself into Wosner’s account of the D. 574 violin sonata in A major.
Things got better when Bell advanced to the other end of the nineteenth century. He was much more in his element with movements having tempo adjectives such as “appassionato,” “espressivo,” and “animato.” Nevertheless, he overplayed his hand even when Wosner tried to establish a more disciplined frame of reference. On the other hand, Bell consistently found the right approaches to expressiveness in the Prokofiev and Ravel sonatas, and his chemistry with Wosner could not have been better. The evening concluded with an encore performance of “Mélodie,” the last of the three movements in Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir d’us lieu cher (memory of a dear place). In many ways, the brevity of the Tchaikovsky movement came across as more expressive than any of the multi-movement sonatas, making for a “less is better” evening.
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