Idiosyncrasy and its Discontents

Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja (from her San Francisco Performances event page)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and her accompanist, pianist Polina Leschenko, both made their San Francisco recital debut in a program presented by San Francisco Performances. Kopatchinskaja has been on my radar for the better part of this decade. I first encountered her work through my Examiner.com writing, which brought me to her album on the naïve label of concertos by György Ligeti, Béla Bartók, and Peter Eötvös, who was also her conductor. That album was released late in 2012. That recording was honored in London with a Gramophone award; and, while it made the cut for a GRAMMY nomination, John Corigliano’s concerto album came away with the award.

About three years later she showed up on an ECM Records album of music by Giya Kancheli, performing with violinist Gidon Kremer, who had been instrumental in bringing attention to Kancheli’s compositions. After that I lost touch with her recording work until February of 2016, when Sony Classical released her performance of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 35 violin concerto in D major, performing with the MusicAeterna orchestra conducted by Teodor Currentzis. This recording struck like a lightning bolt, since any resemblance to Tchaikovsky’s music came off as purely coincidental. Whether it was a matter of phrasing or bowing technique, if there was a way to distort Tchaikovsky’s text and the spirit behind that text, Kopatchinskaja found it.

The result of all of these experiences was that I approached last night’s recital with considerable curiosity, modulated by skepticism and trepidation. All of the composers on the printed program were from the twentieth century: Béla Bartók, Francis Poulenc, George Enescu, and Maurice Ravel. As a result, I did not expect the sort of jolt that her Tchaikovsky recording had registered. On the other hand they were also a far cry from composers like Ligeti and Eötvös, so I was willing to go in with no strong thoughts about what to expect. Given what I got, that was probably just as well.

Over the course of the evening, my most satisfying experience came from Enescu’s Opus 25 (third) violin sonata in A minor. Enescu was born in Romania, but most of his influential studies took place in Paris. At the time he composed Opus 25 (in 1926), he had a global career and was as successful in the United States as he was in Europe. He gave the Opus 25 sonata a title, “Dans le charactère populaire roumain,” suggesting a connection to indigenous Romanian music. Ironically, much of that “Romanian character” resides in the piano’s highly effective evocations of the sounds of the cimbalom, the Eastern European version of a hammered dulcimer.

Kopatchinskaja never seemed to have a problem with Leschenko taking the spotlight for those passages, and the results could not have been more engaging. However, in that rich context it was unclear that Kopatchinskaja had much to add. This was more than a little ironic, given that Enescu himself was not only a violinist but one of the leading violin teachers of his day. (His best known pupil was probably Yehudi Menuhin.)

Still, if Kopatchinskaja was inclined to give things a rest during the Enescu performance, this may have been due to the vast amounts energy expended on the two preceding selections, the sonatas of Poulenc and Bartók (his second), played in that order. The Bartók offering seemed to offer the best interplay between violinist and pianist, neither of whom had any trouble rising to the technical demands that the composer posed. Nevertheless, over the course of the sonata’s two movements, there were persistent indicators that the composer’s rhetoric had been short-changed in the interest of Kopatchinskaja’s idiosyncratic approaches to expressiveness. It was almost as if Bartók’s spirit had taken flight, leaving behind only his marks on paper. (During the intermission I could not resist the urge to check the music stand to see if Kopatchinskaja had actually been playing from Bartók’s score.) In the case of Poulenc, the circumstances were even more extreme.

It is hard to imagine that Kopatchinskaja would have tried to do unto Poulenc what she had done unto Tchaikovsky, but that seems to have been what she achieved. As a result of her ferociously aggressive bowing, the attentive listener familiar with the sonata would have had a hard time recognizing the composer’s thematic material. Any trace of the Poulenc’s Gallic exuberance was lost in a take-no-prisoners salvo of the notes themselves. Furthermore, the program concluded with another disappointing treatment of similar French rhetoric in Maurice Ravel’s “Tzigane.” Anyone who knows this wild evocation of gypsy music knows that the piece is a real show-stopper; but, by virtue of her warped account of the score, Kopatchinskaja may be the first violinist to make this piece sound boring.

As an addition to the printed program, she decided that some “fresh air” was required before launching into Bartók’s dissonances. (To be fair, in the context of what we listen to today, those dissonances no longer sound particularly harsh; and some of them are downright appealing.) As a result, she chose to precede Bartók’s sonata with one of the three “romances” of Clara Schumann’s Opus 22, composed for violin and piano. (I do not know these pieces very well, but I am pretty sure that Kopatchinskaja played the first of them, in the key of D-flat major, with its Andante molto tempo.) Considering what she had just done to Poulenc, the clarity of her execution was refreshing, to say the least.

The encore selection was a short Kancheli piece dedicated to Kremer. (Kopatchinskaja’s voice did not carry very far from the edge of the stage, so I was unable to pick up on any additional specifics.) Kancheli is one of those rare composers who can be called both a minimalist and a maximalist. This particular piece for solo violin was an exquisite miniaturist exercise, and Kopatchinskaja presented it with all the intimacy to do justice to its rhetoric. Had she been that attentive to all of the other composers on her program, the evening would have been much more satisfying.