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San Francisco Classical
Voice, 28 April, 2006 By MICHELLE DULAK THOMSON When people care about
a matter deeply, intimacy is practically a recipe for enmity. There's
no surer way to provoke a quarrel than to throw together a lot of folks
who all believe passionately in the same thing, but disagree about what
exactly it is. If proof is needed, just read Jonathan Russell's article
on new music in the Bay Area in last week's SFCV, and the many reader
responses in the current issue. To caricature: One party agrees with Russell
that most of the music performed by the ensembles he names is dull and
without any sort of striking profile. The other party ... wishes the first
party would just go form its own ensembles (to do the music it likes)
and leave other ensembles to do the music they like in peace. ...Things
generally degenerate from there. Trust Midori to walk in here and cut
the Gordian Knot. If nothing else, her symposium on April 16 and her recital
with pianist Robert McDonald on April 27 laid out the common ground. Perform
music you believe in; know why you believe in it; tell people why you
believe in it; perform it well. ...It wasn't a program that screamed "High
Modernism," though it wouldn't have taken an experienced eye to find
the one obviously "light" piece on offer. That was Judith Weir's
Music for 247 Strings, a whirlwind sequence of tiny movements that
opened the concert. The title refers to the combined strings of violin
and piano, and the idea evidently is to make the two part of the same
larger instrument, as much as possible. So for the first few movements,
violin and piano are always in rhythmic unison. Later one or the other
has some brief independence, but only for a while. There is an episode
with some pretty broad "meows" in it, and a whimsical ending
that owed not a little to Midori's bow control. Györgi Kurtág's
Tre pezzi, Op. 14e, was slight in a quite different way, delicate
and spare and yet meaning something in every note. [The tone] doesn't
draw attention to itself; it practically begs to go offstage. Midori didn't
go offstage, but she spoke more quietly than I've ever heard a violinist
dare. The pieces are based on songs, and something of the frailty and
humanity of song clung to the line even when the violin part broke it
up into two lines. ...The concluding work was the only one anyone was
likely to know, Lutoslawski's Partita, written more than 20 years
ago for Pinchas Zukerman and about the closest thing we have to a modern
violin/piano classic. It goes without saying that Midori played the hell
out of it, but it ought not to go without saying that she made the thing
live. You do not all that often get such conviction bundled so conveniently
with such technique. ... |
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