Elegantly Expressive Duo Recital at Davies

Last night’s recitalists Midori and Jean-Yves Thibaudet (from the San Francisco Symphony event page)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, the San Francisco Symphony Great Performers Series presented the return of violinist Midori to San Francisco. She was joined at the piano by a regular visitor to Davies, pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. This was definitely a duo of equals, and the chemistry between Midori and Thibaudet could not have been more engaging.

Much of that engaging quality, however, came from the elegant symmetries of the program, symmetries that were reflected even in the encore selections. While the four selections on the program sheet were in chronological order, the core of the plan, so to speak, could be found on either side of the intermission. The first half concluded with Gabriel Fauré’s Opus 13 (first) violin sonata in A major. This sonata was completed in 1876, early in Fauré’s career when he served as deputy to Camille Saint-Saëns in his post as principal organist at La Madeleine in Paris. The intermission was then followed by Claude Debussy’s 1917 violin sonata, his last major composition whose debut marked his last public performance, accompanying violinist Gaston Poulet.

It is worth noting that there was a bond of sorts between Fauré and Debussy. Although Fauré was almost two decades senior to Debussy, he was instrumental in adding the Debussy repertoire (which, at the time, was still “work in progress”) to the curriculum of the Conservatoire de Paris when he served as director, while Debussy’s earliest works show signs of his having used Fauré as a model. One might almost say that Fauré was Debussy’s favored view of the past, while Fauré himself turned to Debussy for a view of the future, a view that he himself would continue to pursue even after Debussy’s death.

Since both Fauré and Debussy were pianists, it is no surprise that, in their sonatas, piano and violin meet on a level playing field. Indeed, Thibaudet was clearly in a comfort zone with both of these composers; but, as an accompanist, he kept himself consistently on guard against overshadowing Midori. As a result both of these sonatas emerged as conversations between equals, so to speak; and the attentive listener could readily grasp the distinctive roles played by each of the conversers.

Ironically, Saint-Saëns also figured in Fauré’s career development by introducing him to the music of Robert Schumann, whose music was not studied at the Conservatoire until Saint-Saëns added it to the curriculum in 1861 (five years after Schumann’s death). How much Fauré knew about Schumann’s Opus 105 (first) violin sonata in A major, which opened the program, is left as an exercise for the researcher. Opus 105 was composed in 1851, a productive time during which the first signs of mental affliction were beginning to surface.

Schumann himself was apparently not happy with the piece, and it would be fair to say that there are times when it seems as if he is pushing his inventive capacities a bit too hard. Nevertheless, both Midori and Thibaudet knew how to take this music on its own terms without trying to polish over some of the more daring rhetorical gestures. If Schumann was having trouble keeping his passions in check, last night’s present-day reading of the sonata never allow those passions to rise to annoying excess.

The final work on the program was George Enescu’s Opus 25 (third) violin sonata. Enescu was a child prodigy. Born in Romania, he was admitted to the Vienna Conservatory at the age of seven. He then moved on to Paris in his early teens, where Fauré was one of his teachers. By the time of Debussy’s death, Enescu had an established reputation, which was frequently marked by Romanian influences.

That is definitely the case in his Opus 25, which explicitly acknowledges those influences in its subtitle. Much of the keyboard work involves evoking the haunting sonorities of a cimbalom, particularly the repeated notes arising from the two beaters that strike the cimbalom strings. On the other hand the melodic lines for the violin are rich in modal qualities, qualities that do not fit very comfortably within the confines on an equal-tempered scale. Midori was well aware of this inconsistency and seemed to be constantly “pulling” her pitches to bring those modal qualities to the foreground, even when they were somewhat at odds with the background provided by the piano.

Opus 25 is a moderately long composition, much of which has a discursive and improvisatory rhetoric. Both Midori and Thibaudet, however, kept the longueurs of Enescu’s style from devolving into a tedious sense of one-thing-after-another. They knew how to exploit the unique qualities of each of his thematic gestures, resulting in the sort of reading that keeps the attentive listener on the edge of his/her seat. The overall span of the entire program was about 75 years, but Midori and Thibaudet presented this final selection as a confidently joyous arrival at a significant time in music history.

Each of them was responsible for adding an encore, both of which reflected back on the first half of the program. Midori turned to the third movement of Schumann’s Opus 121 (second) violin sonata in D minor, which makes significant pizzicato demands on the violinist as it works its way through a set of variations on a G major theme. Thibaudet’s selection was the first of the three songs that Fauré collected in his Opus 7, “Après un rêve;” and it would not surprise me if Midori simply played the vocal line from the original score. (Having worked on this song with a baritone colleague, I have to confess for affectionate feelings about it!)

Taken as a whole, this recital offered a thoroughly engaging journey through a significant period of change and growth in music history; and both Midori and Thibaudet have now set an impressively high bar for imaginatively informing programming.