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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
August 3, 2010
When playing the traditional parlour game "Can You Name Six Famous Belgians?" (correct answer: "no") the city of Liège should loom fairly large in your strategy, supplying, as it does, several names worthy of mention.
The best known today is probably that of Georges Simenon (author of the Maigret stories), but go back a century and two names would have towered above the rest - and both were musicians: César Franck and Eugène Ysaÿe.
In fact, 100 years ago, it is quite possible that Ysaÿe was more of a household name than Franck, for he was one of the supreme virtuosos of what is now considered a Golden Age of violin playing. Indeed he was referred to as "The King of the Violin".
Although Ysaÿe's most lasting contribution to music may well be the perennially popular Violin Sonata of Franck - suggested by, written for, dedicated to and first performed by Ysaÿe - he did write a fair amount himself, including eight concertos and even an opera, although little, if any, of this is every performed today.
Which made Jonathan Crow's inclusion of the third of Ysaÿe's six sonatas for solo violin, composed in 1923, in his programme on Tuesday evening, all the more welcome.
The Ysaÿe was the odd man out of the four works on the programme, all dubbed "sonata", in that it alone did not include piano accompaniment.
Opening the evening was Mozart's Sonata in B flat, K.454 - Wolfgang appears to have been in something of a B flat mood in 1784: K.450, K.456 (the Piano Concertos Nos.15 and 18) and K.458 (the "Hunt" string quartet) are also in this key.
The performance was a delight from beginning to end, with Crow producing richly-hued double stops in the slow introduction, and a poised cantabile in the second movement, with its misterioso minor-key section.
The finale was lively, even brusque in places, with a distinctly playful element.
Arthur Rowe's playing (I hesitate to say "accompaniment" as the Mozart sonatas were published as being for "piano and violin") was crisp and fresh, as Mozart demands.
Indeed, one might remark that, from one point of view, the recital was an object lesson from both players in suiting tone-colours to a composer's particular style.
As immediately became obvious as the duo launched into Schumann's Sonata in A minor, Op.105 from 1851.
This is not exactly untroubled music, nor was its composer entirely happy with it - "I did not like the first Sonata for Violin and Piano; so I wrote a second one, which I hope has turned out better" - but it has much to recommend it, particularly in a performance this fine.
The first movement, for example, after a turbulent opening, is one of those opening movements Schumann did so well, in which the listener is carried along, as if by the flood-tide; the first movement of the "Rhenish" symphony (coincidentally, premiered in the same year) is another example.
After this movement, with its intensely dramatic close (incidentally, for everyone who was wondering at the interval, the movement's marking, "mit leidenschaftlichem Ausdruck" would appear to mean something along the lines of "with passionate expression" - definitely taken to heart by Crow and Rowe) the second movement was charmingly playful and the finale ("lebhaft", "lively") was very "lebhaft" indeed, although not untrammeled by emotional turmoil.
It was, though, happily unencumbered (unlike the finales of the piano quartet and quintet) with Schumann's attempting to write a fugue. For which relief, much thanks.
A most distinguished performance.
The Ysaÿe sonata is cast a single movement; composed in the early 1920s it is stylistically hardly avant-garde for the time, but neither is it old-fashioned.
The music is full of double-stops, half-tones and chromatic harmonies, with the occasionally melody seeping through. It is certainly neither easy to play nor, for the listener, easy to take in at a single hearing.
Crow evidently cares a great deal for this music and gave it a reading of tremendous intensity and virtuosity. It certainly left me keen to hear the remaining five sonatas - preferably played by Crow.
During the rehearsals for the first performance of Sergei Prokofiev's Violin Sonata No.1 the composer complained that the pianist, Lev Oborin, played one passage, marked forte, with insufficient agression.
Oborin explained that he was afraid of drowning the violinist, David Oistrakh, to which Prokofiev replied "It should sound in such a way that people should jump in their seat, and people will say 'Is he out of his mind?'".
The gestation period for the sonata was unusually long, some eight years in fact, from 1938 to 1946 - resulting in its completion two years after the second sonata.
Given those dates one would hardly expect the work to be a cheerful one and it is easy to understand why Prokofiev's music in general - with its often acerbic harmonies and rapidly shifting moods - has not attained the popularity of his fellow countryman Shostakovich.
Insofar as I am aware, nobody did actually jump in their seats during Tuesday's performance, but it was certainly due to no lack of emotional commitment or intensity on the part of the performers.
Whether it was Rowe's ominous piano in the very opening of the work, the anguished lyricism of Crow's violin, the bell-like piano chords accompanying the "wind passing through the graveyard" scales, the violin's heavily lyrical never-quite-serene melodic outpouring in the third movement over opalescent piano figurations, or the bravura display of the finale, both players were at their very best in this far-from-easy music.
In fact, with the exception of a couple of Prokofiev's more obvious crowd-pleasers, I have rarely heard such a response to a performance as came from the near-capacity crowd at the end of the sonata.
Which, of course, produced an encore in the shape of an exquisitely-molded Meditation from Thaïs by Massenet.
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