Last night in Herbst Theatre, violinist Daniel Hope gave his San Francisco recital debut in a performance presented by Chamber Music San Francisco (CMSF). He was accompanied at the piano by Simon Crawford-Phillips. The program spanned music from the nineteenth to the current century, including the United States premiere of Jake Heggie’s Fantasy Suite 1803, completed in 2022. There was also a last-minute augmentation, which did not appear on the program sheet.
The high point of the evening came in the second half, which was devoted entirely to César Franck’s A major violin sonata. I first became acquainted with this music in the late Seventies during my time in Santa Barbara. I had a neighbor on the faculty of the Music Departments at the University of California, and she was preparing this sonata for a recital. Since I was a frequent visitor to her unit, I heard a wide diversity of excerpts from the sonata each time I came to her door; so I was well prepared for my first encounter with the sonata in its entirety. It remains one of my favorites, and the expressiveness that both Hope and Crawford-Phillips brought to their interpretation triggered many fond memories.
The same could be said of the encore selection, Fritz Kreisler’s “Liebesleid” (love’s sorrow), the second of the two pieces collected under the title Alt-Wiener Tanzweisen (old Viennese melodies). This is music I have known from childhood, probably because it was often injected into soundtracks for silent cartoons! Hope’s delivery captured the nostalgia of the music without letting the rhetoric get too syrupy.
The first half of the program did not leave as strong an impression. The opening selection was George Enescu’s “Impromptu Concertante.” Enescu was a major figure in the twentieth century, not only as a composer but also as a violinist, a conductor, and a teacher. “Impromptu Concertante” was one of his earliest works, composed in 1903 but not published until 1958. In retrospect I would call it one of those pieces by an up-and-coming-talent throwing everything but the kitchen sink into his efforts. Hope had a solid command of the technical demands, but the overall rhetorical framework left much to be desired.
This was followed by Maurice Ravel’s first violin sonata, composed in the key of A minor and not published until after his death. This was a relatively short single-movement composition, and one can appreciate why Ravel never published it. Hope chose to segue it into Suite populaire espagnole, six of the seven Spanish folksongs (Siete canciones populares españolas) composed by Manuel de Falla, who made the arrangement with Paul Kochanski. I never fail to enjoy these pieces, regardless of setting; but I did not think that Hope quite caught the spirit of the music.
The first half of the program concluded with the Heggie suite, and the composer was on hand to introduce the audience to its four movements. Considering its relatively brevity, this music was, as they say, “all over the map,” which may have been foreboded by an opening movement entitled “Constellations.” The following movements capture the aggressive nature of Ludwig van Beethoven, the rise and fall of his relationship with George Bridgetower (for whom the “Kreutzer” sonata was written), and Heggie’s own opera Dead Man Walking. (I am surprised that the kitchen sink did not show up in the midst of all that diversity!)
Fortunately, the second half of the program compensated for any shortcomings encountered during the first.
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