Shenson Spotlight: Violinist Alexandra Conunova

Violinist Alexandra Conunova (photograph by Anoush Abrar, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, violinist Alexandra Conunova was the third recitalist in the third season of the Shenson Spotlight Series, presented by the San Francisco Symphony. Conunova is Moldovan, and she was accompanied at the piano by Tamila Salimdjanova, who was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The major work on the program, however, was Norwegian, Edvard Grieg’s Opus 45, the last of his three sonatas for violin and piano.

Grieg completed this sonata in 1887. It may be worth noting that, while the first two sonatas were composed in a matter of weeks, Opus 45 took him several months. It is a major undertaking with a rich thematic vocabulary and no end of technical challenges for the soloist. (Since Grieg’s primary instrument was the piano, the accompanist was probably already familiar with many of rhetorical turns.) Conunova gave a fierce account in rising to the many challenged presented to her in her score pages. By the time things had calmed down in the coda of the final movement, the attentive listener had journeyed with her through a vast landscape of themes and developments.

Ironically, Johan Dalene played this same sonata a little over a year ago, when he presented his Shenson Spotlight Series recital; and Randall Goosby played it at his Spotlight recital the preceding year! Equally interesting is that Stella Chen, who will be the final Shenson recitalist, played the Opus 13, second, sonata in her San Francisco debut with Chamber Music San Francisco almost exactly a year ago. Grieg’s chamber music seems to have fared well here in the Civic Center, if not elsewhere!

The Grieg sonata was preceded by the opening selection, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 261. This was an Adagio movement in E major composed for violin and orchestra. Its Wikipedia page claims that it may have been written to replace the slow movement in the K. 219 (fifth) violin concerto. Most likely, Conunova played the duo arrangement prepared by Paul Klengel in the early twentieth century. This was one of those joys-of-unfamiliar-Mozart selections, which made for an excellent opening gesture.

Conunova followed her Grieg performance with more familiar selections from the “war horse” category. The first of these was a dynamite account of Camille Saint-Saëns Opus 28, the Rondo capriccioso preceded by an Introduction. She played this without any score pages, possibly to avoid setting them on fire with her dynamic rhetoric. The program then concluded with Franz Waxman’s “Carmen Fantasie.” This music originated in Waxman’s score for the movie Humoresque. After seeing the film, Heifetz asked Waxman to expand his efforts into a piece he could include in his performances. It was originally composed for violin and orchestra, but Heifetz seems to have arranged it for piano accompaniment. Last night it served as the “punctuation mark” at the conclusion of the program!

The encore selection was Béla Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances suite, six short movements originally composed for solo piano and given an abundance of arrangements, including one for small orchestra (which was given a separate number in András Szőllősy’s catalog). The offering allowed the performers to return to their Eastern European roots. The music was probably familiar to many (most?) in the audience, providing just the right spirits to send us all on our way home!