Philadelphia Inquirer, 25 April, 2006

New-music composers get well-deserved exposure

By DAVID PATRICK STEARNS

Midori, the star violinist whom Philadelphia Orchestra subscribers know mostly for works like the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto ...[has] made a concerted commitment to new music of late, culminating with this program of works written between 1979 and 2000 ... They form an unusually satisfying whole, to which Midori brings the charisma she gives to Tchaikovsky. That, and her superb pianist, Robert McDonald, made the concert more successful than you could hope for.

The miniature pieces on the program posed the greatest challenges (they're so contrary to the blocks of music of any Beethoven sonata) ... Having commissioned and played Michael Hersch's 2004 sonata The Wreckage of Flowers, consisting of 21 micromovements, Midori was in good stead for Judith Weir's Music for 247 Strings, which is similarly conceived, with 10 movements in 10 minutes. Unlike Hersch, Weir isn't above planting wisecracks among her musical haiku. The piece isn't deep, but Midori made it delightful. Why isn't Weir better known?

... Gyorgy Kurtag's Three Pieces for Violin and Piano ... asks the performer to find worlds of expression in short movements built on very few notes. Clearly, Midori had given the piece much consideration, thoughtfully creating sounds that shift between foreground and background. There was no barrier between this supposedly difficult but marvelously pared-down music and any alert listener.

Similarly, the 1991 Violin Sonata of the late Korean composer Isang Yun gave the violin lots of long, soaring notes, which would seem to let Midori off easy compared to the modernist density of the piano part. But the peaks and valleys were in her hands, and she molded them with ... drama and passion