Violinist Mayuko Kamio’s Imaginative Program

Yesterday afternoon in Herbst Theatre, Chamber Music San Francisco presented the penultimate program in its 2024 season, a violin recital by Mayuko Kamio, accompanied at the piano by Noreen Cassidy-Polera. The first half of the program offered the sort of music one would expect from such a recital, coupling a sonata by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (K. 304 in E minor) with one by Johannes Brahms (Opus 100, the second, in A major). Kamio preceded these with a solo performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1006, the third partita, in the key of E major, in the collection of six sonata and partitas for solo violin.

All of these selections were given disciplined accounts of the music. Kamio even honored the “unwritten invitation” to provide her own embellishments to the movements of the Bach partita. She also knew how to establish the individual characteristic qualities of each of the partita’s dance movements. Where the sonatas were concerned, each composer had his own approach to expressiveness; and Kamio knew just how to honor both of them. Given that the piano was Brahms’ primary instrument, the interplay in his sonata was particularly evident and could not have been better reflected by the duo’s joint interpretation.

Those of my generation probably remember the British comedy duo of pianist (and composer) Donald Swann and singer (and lyricist) Michael Flanders. Flanders did most of the talking; and his most memorable line was, “We’re running a little late, so we are going to perform all our encores in a single burst!” Kamio did him one better: She devoted the entire second half of the program to nine short selections, all of which are usually performed as encores!

The “order of appearance” of these pieces was as follows:

1. César Franck, Salut d’Amour
2. Antonín Dvořák, Songs My Mother Taught Me
3. Manuel Ponce, Estrellita
4. Fritz Kreisler, Liebesfreud
5. Fritz Kreisler, Liebesleid
6. Sergei Rachmaninoff, Vocalise
7. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Waltz-Scherzo
8. Grigoraș Dinicu, Hora Staccato
9. Vittorio Monti, Csárdás

These were followed by the “real” encore for the program, Antonio Bazzini’s Opus 25, his “Scherzo fantastique,” better known by the title he attached: “The Dance of the Goblins.” While this approach to programming threatened to be “one damned thing after another,” the combination of diversity and expressive interpretation resulted in a thoroughly engaging overall journey.

2021 cropped photograph of violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter (provided by Quincena Musical, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, from Wikimedia Commons)

While I usually do not report on such matters, I feel it is worth reporting on Kamio’s taste in strapless gowns (one for each half of the program). My generation recalls Anne-Sophie Mutter (above), who had a similar wardrobe. She has been reported as saying that any fabric provided a surface that was too slippery. As I recall, the way she put it was that she wanted to feel her instrument on her own flesh. I have no idea whether Kamio was influenced by Mutter, but there was no questioning her sure command of every gesture with her instrument!

SFS: Ray Chen’s Great Performers Recital

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) continued its Great Performers Series with a recital by violinist Ray Chen, accompanied at the piano by Julio Elizalde. Chen is no stranger to Davies, having been a Shenson Young Artist in 2018 after having made his SFS debut in January of 2011. (The duo also made its San Francisco Performances debut at the Gift Concert in March of 2014.) As an indicator of how long I have been at this present gig, I remember first seeing Elizalde as a student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; and now he is a member of the faculty!

The program that Chen prepared was an unabashed nod to the violinist Jascha Heifetz.  Four of the works on the program (and one of the three encores) can be found in The Heifetz Collection, the 46-volume account of the recordings the violinist made for RCA Victor. (Several of those volumes have multiple CDs.) What was important about last night, however, was that none of Chen’s performances reflected Heifetz’ approach to interpretation. Where my own listening experiences are concerned, each was an engagingly fresh take on many of my favorite encounters with recordings.

The program began with the one selection that was not in the RCA collection, Giuseppe Tartini’s GT 2.g05 violin sonata in G minor. To be more accurate, however, Chen played Fritz Kreisler’s arrangement of that sonata, which included realizing the figured bass into a piano accompaniment and adding a cadenza of his own that pretty much overshadowed everything that Tartini had composed. Chen gave that cadenza all of the attention that Kreisler would have desired. By the time that passage had run its course, it was clear that he had everyone in the audience on the edge of their respective seats!

Having firmly seized attention, Chen and Elizalde were ready to proceed with their Beethoven offering, the second of the three Opus 30 sonatas, composed in the key of C minor (the only minor-key work in the set). Chen introduced this piece by stressing how it contrasted with the other two Opus 30 compositions, making the case that this was Beethoven at his most expressive. Sure enough, the performance itself disclosed the full extent of that expressiveness. Indeed, one could say that the expressiveness emerged from the acute attention to every single note given by both of the performers, resulting an an interpretation that made for edge-of-your-seat attentive listening.

After the intermission Chen took the stage alone to cultivate further attentive listening from his approach to Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1006 solo violin partita in E major. Among the six works in BWV 1001–1006, accounting for three sonatas and three partitas, this last tends to be the most familiar, particularly for its energetic opening Preludio and the thoroughly dance-like Gavotte en Rondeau. I also noted that, in the two Menuetto movements, there was no da capo structure, returning to the first after playing the second. This may not have been a “historically-informed” account of Bach’s music; but, as contemporary perspectives go, Chen found just the right dispositional stances to take for each of the partita’s movements.

Chen then chatted a bit about how the program could be conceived as a “menu” of sorts, with Bach being the “main course.” That was his way of introducing the remainder of the program as a series of desserts! This began with two favorites in the Heifetz canon. The first of these was Antonio Bazzini’s finger-busting “La Ronde des Lutins” (the dance of the goblins), captured by RCA during Heifetz’ first recording session on December 19, 1917. This was followed by the second of the “Slavonic Dances” in Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 72 collection (another early Heifetz recording).

Chen and Elizalde then took a “great leap forward” into the twentieth century. They concluded the program with their own arrangement of Chick Corea’s “Spain,” which he had composed in 1971. This took Joaquín Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez” as a point of departure and then unfolded its own set of samba riffs. For my own listening, this provided an excellent complement to the Spanish guitar music I had experienced on Saturday evening!

Julio Elizalde and Ray Chen playing “A Evaristo Carriego” (screen shot from their YouTube video)

The audience was so enthusiastic that they would not leave until three encores had been taken. The first of these was “A Evaristo Carriego,” a tango, which Chen and Elizalde recorded for a YouTube video. The second was not announced; but my guess is that it was the eleventh piece in Johannes Brahms’ Hungarian Dances collection (the first in the third book). The final encore returned to early Heifetz with the performance of Manuel Ponce’s “Estrellita.” Taken as a whole, this made for an evening that was definitely “one for the books!”

Violin Virtuosity

Back when I was living in Palo Alto, I had a friend in Portola Valley who turned over his house to host a recital by the winner of the annual Irving M. Klein International String Competition every spring. Now that I live in San Francisco, the Noontime Concerts™ series at Old St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco has given me the same opportunity. Today's concert was given by the winner of the first prize in the 2007 competition, Jing Wang, accompanied at the piano by Jeewon Lee. His offering was an hour of full-out virtuosity.

The middle work on the program was also very much the centerpiece of the concert, particularly since it featured Wang unaccompanied. It was the fourth sonata (in E minor) of the Opus 27 of Eugène Ysaÿe, a set of six sonatas for solo violin. These were composed in 1923; and each sonata is dedicated to a personal friend, all of whom were celebrated violinists at that time. The dedicatee for the fourth sonata is Fritz Kreisler, who, himself, was one of the great virtuosos of his time. While the score indicates a classical structure of three movements (Allemanda, Sarabande, Finale), one would be hard put to hear the first two movements in the same terms of the dance forms that Johann Sebastian Bach had in his settings. Indeed, while Ysaÿe may have intended to hide this, the entire sonata sounds like it was heavily influenced by the concluding chaconne from Bach's D minor (BWV 1004) partita for unaccompanied violin, which has a similar tripartite structure. Since, according to the Nimbus notes by Margaret Campbell, Ysaÿe conceived of his Opus 27 project after having heard Joseph Szigeti perform one of Bach's solo sonatas and since, if you count both sonatas and partitas, Bach wrote a total of six of these works, it would not surprise me if a little bit of Bach resides in each of them, implicitly if not explicitly. (His presence in Ysaÿe's second sonata is downright blatant!)

Thanks to Ferruccio Busoni, Bach's chaconne has become of monument of virtuosity for the piano, as well as solo violin. Since Busoni composed his transcription in 1900, it is entirely possible that Ysaÿe was familiar with it and may have taken it as a challenge. If Busoni could "up the ante" of virtuosity by transcribing Bach violin music for piano, Ysaÿe could "raise the stakes further" with a violin solo even more demanding than the one Bach had composed; and I think that this provides a better way of listening to Opus 27, Number 4 than by trying to think in terms of the movements and their labels. I have no idea if this is how Wang approached the work; but his technical execution was so solid and robust that it was almost as if he had summoned (and honored) the spirits of Bach, Busoni, Ysaÿe, and Kreisler.

As I said, this performance assumed the role of centerpiece; but it was far from the highest point of Wang's virtuosity, since, without leaving us much time to catch our breaths, it was followed by Maurice Ravel's "Tzigane," composed around the same time as the Ysaÿe sonatas (1924) for the Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Arányi. The accompaniment was composed for Luthéal, a piano-like instrument with organ-like stops for a variety of tone colors. One of those options was the sound of the Hungarian cimbalom; and, as its name implies, "Tzigane" is an invocation of the spirit of Hungarian gypsies. For this performance Lee played an ordinary grand piano, but the gypsy spirit was alive and well Actually, the violin plays solo for approximately the first third of the composition; and much of that solo consists of the dark growl of the G string. The work builds from an initial somber darkness to dazzling bright light at a pace that gets wilder and wilder until you expect both performers to collapse.

However, even after performing the Ravel, Wang had not yet exhausted his virtuosity. As an encore he then dashed off "La ronde des lutins," the Opus 25 "Scherzo fantastique" of Antonio Bazzini. Bazzini is late nineteenth century; and this is one of those works that, in its time, set the bar for virtuosity (which Ysaÿe and Ravel then proceeded to raise). "Lutin" is French for "goblin;" so this is one of those works that glorifies the diabolical quality of violin virtuosity made so famous (notorious?) by Niccolò Paganini. This was Wang's "final statement" for his program; and it certainly made his departure of blaze of glory (with a faint whiff of sulfur).

Since I seem to make a habit of accusing San Francisco Chronicle critic Joshua Kosman of not paying enough attention when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is on a San Francisco Symphony program, I do not want to commit the same sin by ignoring that Wang's program began with Mozart K. 454 B-flat major violin sonata. The catalog of recordings that Jascha Heifetz made for RCA includes only three Mozart sonatas. This sonata is one of them; and he recorded it twice, first in 1936 and again in 1954. (With the exception of Ysaÿe, whose works Heifetz never recorded, this was very much a "Heifetz program" in both substance and spirit.) Mozart composed violin sonatas almost throughout the entirety of his life. This one was composed in 1784, after he had been in Vienna for a few years. In the Köchel catalog it sits right in the middle of those six string quartets that Mozart dedicated to Joseph Haydn, which means that, to some extent, virtuosity of composition takes precedence over virtuosity of performance. Much of that virtuosity of composition has to do with the way in which the piano provides both accompanying harmonies and one or more melodic voices that engage with the voice of the violin. In this case the performance hinges on the extent to which the melodic voices blend properly without ever obscuring their harmonic context. This was thus the most demanding work on the program for Wang and Lee playing as a well integrated ensemble (even if there were only two of them). The demand was all the greater, since this was the work that began the program; and their joint understanding of Mozart definitely got things off to the best possible start, serving almost as an excellent supplement to last week's "pre-season preview" of the Midsummer Mozart Festival.