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!”
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