Vadim Gluzman and Brooklyn Rider
Vadim Gluzman St. Francis Auditorium, Feb. 10 Brooklyn Rider Lensic Performing Arts Center, Feb. 9 Last weekend was dense with the sound of strings. Perhaps the overabundance of offerings accounted for the slender attendance at the recital by violinist Vadim Gluzman presented by Performance Santa Fe at St. Francis Auditorium on Feb. 10.
Gluzman seems to put all of his effort into musicmaking rather than marketing, and he accordingly remains less broadly famous than quite a few of the other top-tier violinists who are more aggressively promoted. His playing was magnificent, informed by all the hallmarks string aficionados have come to expect of him. He exuded confidence and security, big-hearted expressivity, and a full-throated tone that combined sweetness with amplitude. His bow technique was remarkable; one especially appreciated how he energized his sound from the moment of attack through to the release of a phrase. His approach was embedded in a Russian and Ukrainian tradition that has consistently produced some of the instrument’s greatest practitioners. The high point was the Baal Shem Suite of Ernest Bloch, which Gluzman played with immense authority born of discipline rather than abandon. (Of interest to locals: It was premiered in 1924, a few months before Bloch spent a six-week sabbatical in Santa Fe. Here he wrote six compositions in a studio provided for him in the New Mexico Museum of Art, which also houses St. Francis Auditorium. Two of those pieces are founded on Jewish themes, just as Baal Shem is.)
Notwithstanding Gluzman’s bona fides as a fiddler, his program was not an unqualified success. One can appreciate a violinist choosing not to play a sonata by Beethoven or Brahms for the thousandth time, but his concert lacked an anchor of commensurate quality. It opened with the jejune scales and arpeggios of Arvo Pärt’s annoyingly vacant Spiegel im Spiegel and continued with the meandering, overlong Violin Sonata of the twenty-four-year-old Richard Strauss. Though far from unknown, it is not a repertoire standard, and I doubt that any violinist can prevent it from wearing out its welcome, even one who infuses its slow movement with the gorgeous tone Gluzman did. The situation was not helped by pianist Angela Yoffe, the violinist’s wife. We should acknowledge that Strauss wrote an immensely difficult and thick-textured piano part, but in this rendition it often smothered the solo line. There is something heartwarming about performing en famille, to be sure; and yet, Yoffe’s pianism is not at the same lofty level as Gluzman’s violinistry, and the personal pleasure it must have afforded came at an artistic price.
One hoped Stravinsky’s Suite italienne (arranged from his Pulcinella ballet) would enforce a more transparent style; but here again, the violin delivered but the piano did not, the ponderous keyboard-playing proving especially regrettable in the Tarantella movement. The recital concluded with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Figaro, an absurdly difficult amalgam of violinistic wizardry (based on Rossini) that Gluzman negotiated with ease and wit; and, for an encore, an acerbic account of the polka from Alfred Schnittke’s incidental music to Gogol’s
The string quartet Brooklyn Rider provided abundant delight in a recital the preceding evening at the Lensic Performing Arts Center, under the Lensic Presents banner. The group’s public image is that of an avant-gardish ensemble deeply into world-music crossover, but here it presented itself more as a classic quartet — an excellent one that valued clarity over sonic luxury and that unleashed its discourse with detailed inflection. In Mozart’s G-major Quartet (K.387) the musicians played lightly on their strings and went easy on the vibrato, in the manner of periodinstrument practitioners. This leaves no room for imprecise intonation — and, happily, they were spot on. Their playing was precise, elegant, restrained, technically impeccable; in the slow movement, the innate grace supplied all the emotive content one might wish for. The group’s performance of the Ravel String Quartet was also based on restraint, yet it swelled in a nearly orchestral surge just before the first movement’s recapitulation. The musicians found exotic coloring lurking in this familiar score; in the third movement, the muted viola evoked a Frenchschool saxophone. The ensemble’s focus seemed to slacken toward the work’s end, but it was nonetheless an invigorating, ear-opening interpretation displaying quartettish standards of a very high order. Also on the program were an arrangement of João Gilberto’s bossa nova classic “Undiú” and a work the foursome commissioned from Evan Ziporyn — Qi, which owed much to the model of Steve Reich. Especially in the second of its three movements, it achieved imaginative ensemble sounds that suggested the building up of chords in the manner of a Chinese mouth organ (a shoˉ) in one spot, and a hive of buzzing bees in another.
The weekend continued on Sunday with concerts by the Danish String Quartet and the Santa Symphony with cellist Joshua Roman as soloist … and there we shall pick up the thread in next week’s issue.
— James M. Keller