Surprises at SFCM Violin Department Recital

Last night’s video stream of a recital of performances by students in the Violin Department of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) yielded a pair of unexpected surprises. Each half of the program concluded with a performance by a student in the Pre-College Division, rather than a matriculating student in a degree program. These turned out to be the most stimulating offerings of the evening.

The concert concluded with “Subito,” a duo for violin and piano composed by Witold Lutosławski only a few years before his death. Presumably due to the age of the soloist, Grace Huh, the performance was prerecorded. The title is the Italian word for “suddenly” (or sometimes “quickly”); and Lutosławski’s composition was an intense study of different semantic aspects of the term. Huh, working with matriculating accompanist Weicong Zhang, approached every one of the score’s intense gestures with focused fearlessness. She had clearly nailed every technical challenge posed by the score and established an interpretation that never short-changed the underlying expressiveness of the music. Huh is definitely a rising talent to be watched closely.

The Pre-College student that concluded the first half of the program, again with a pre-recorded performance, turned to more familiar repertoire. Nicole Yun played the second movement (Adagio) of Jean Sibelius’ Opus 47 violin concerto in D minor. Her accompanist was also Zhang. Bearing in mind that rich instrumental sonorities play a significant role in establishing the expressiveness of this movement, Yun’s violin work soared above the limitations of the piano accompaniment. As had been the case with Huh, Yun exhibited a confident command of every challenge that Sibelius had posed for the soloist; and, also like Huh, Yun convincingly communicated the expressive side of every phrase.

Those two young rising talents thus evoked impressions that, sadly, overshadowed the rest of the program. Too much of the other six selections proceeded as “business as usual,” making it difficult to determine whether the students’ technical skills were not yet ready to take on expressiveness or whether they just did not have anything to express. The result was a program that as a whole, turned out to be a somewhat awkward affair, made even more awkward by Ian Swensen, serving as host, attempting a casual interview of a few of the performers during an intermission that was probably unnecessary in the interleaving of prerecorded and “live” performances. (This was another situation in which microphones were placed to pick up the instruments, meaning that the interviewing was so casual that it was pretty much inaudible.)