Violinist Midori seems to enjoy visiting San Francisco. Unless I am mistaken, over the course of my living in this city, she has prepared recitals for San Francisco Performances, the Great Performers Series of the San Francisco Symphony, and Chamber Music San Francisco (CMSF). Her programs all tend to take an exploratory stance, whether that involves less familiar compositions or new perspectives on old chestnuts. In preparing last night’s program for CMSF at Herbst Theatre, accompanied at the piano once again by Özgür Aydin, she seemed to balance journeying down both of those paths; and the results could not have been more engaging.
The least familiar offering held the penultimate place on her program. This was the second of two works for violin and piano by the Greek composer Nikos Skalkottas. written in 1946 and entitled Petite Suite. Skalkottas had studied with Arnold Schoenberg in Berlin between 1921 and 1933, which led to his finding his own approaches to composing music without a tonal center. By 1945 he had begun to drift away from Schoenberg’s influence, but Midori’s selection still captured an atonal rhetoric.
The suite itself consisted of only three movements, none of which followed the tradition of being based on dance forms. Instead, the movements distinguished themselves through different approaches to tempo. If there was a certain degree of opacity on the composer’s rhetoric, my own reaction was a hunger for further performances of the piece. Skalkottas had packed a good deal into this “little” composition; and it definitely deserved more than a here-today-gone-tomorrow treatment. Having written about recent recordings of Skalkottas’ music about a year ago, my response to Midori’s performance was a desire to hear more of his music in concert settings.
This suite was followed by the last work on the program, which was also the most familiar: Johannes Brahms’ Opus 108 (third and final) violin sonata in D minor. The contrast with Skalkottas could not have been more stimulating; and, in her partnership with Aydin, Midori established the unique techniques of expressiveness that distinguish each of the sonata’s four movements. (The two earlier Brahms sonatas both had a three-movement structure.) In that framework there was an intense rhetoric of conclusion in the final Presto agitato, whose finality capped off not only the sonata but also the entire program.
The three works that preceded the Skalkottas selection could be described as “less familiar music by familiar composers.” In order of appearance, the composers were Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Robert Schumann, and Johann Sebastian Bach. In the last case Midori chose a sonata for violin and keyboard, rather than any of the more familiar unaccompanied sonatas and partitas. She and Aydin performed the BWV 1023 sonata in E minor, which almost counts as a partita, since its opening Adagio non troppo movement is followed by an Allemande and Gigue as the remaining movements. Aydin’s keyboard work served as continuo support for the violin line, and there was much that was refreshing in Midori’s approach to this less familiar side of the Bach repertoire.
“Refreshing” would also apply to her opening selection, Mozart’s K. 376 violin sonata in F major. The piece was composed in the summer of 1781, shortly after the composer’s move from Salzburg to Vienna. As might be expected, the piano part tended to receive as much attention as the violin line, if not more so. Most likely the music was composed to impress Vienna with the diversity of his talents; but it is clear that the keyboard “accompaniment” had been written for “show-off” purposes. That said, the chemistry between Midori and Aydin did much to allow the violin a bit more of the spotlight!
The Schumann selection was the Opus 121 sonata in D minor, composed in 1851. This was a time when the composer’s activity was at the brink of manic, if not over that brink. One could then be justified in attributing a churning restlessness to the Opus 121 score, as evident in the keyboard work as in the solo violin part.
There are those that suggest that this was the time of the first signs of mental breakdown. However, there is a solid coherence to Opus 121 that should not be eroded by thoughts of the dark times soon to come in Schumann’s life. Both Midori and Aydin were firmly focused on the music itself, allowing those of us on audience side to savor the imaginative inventiveness of Schumann’s score.
Midori’s encore selection turned to a song composed by Samuel Barber. She played the vocal line from “Sure on this shining night,” the third of the songs in his Opus 13 collection. This used to be one of the composer’s best-known songs, and I was reminded of how long it had been since I had listened to this exquisite setting of the words of James Agee. According to my archives, my last encounter with the vocal setting was a performance by Thomas Hampson in February of 2013. Over almost a decade of absence, even a violin arrangement brought back no end of pleasant memories.
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