Violinist’s cadenza lifts so-so concerto
Near the end of Elgar’s characteristically moody and reflective Violin Concerto comes a moment of ethereal beauty all the more striking for being largely unexpected. It arrives at a point when a casual listener might imagine that the piece, having been through two eventful movements and most of a third, had dispatched nearly everything on its expressive agenda.
But then the orchestra pipes down, and the string players begin a quiet ruffled strum on their instruments, producing a textured near-silence like the gentle tapping of glasses before the after-dinner speaker rises to say a few choice words. The world holds its breath, awaiting whatever is next.
And into that expectant void, the violin begins to sing, and soar, and reminisce. It harks back to thematic material from the whole 45-minute span of the work, conjuring up the emotions we felt on first hearing that material while adding a new interpretive wrinkle. It expands on things we thought we knew and reveals how much we’d already forgotten.
This is a cadenza, after a fashion — that climactic moment in any concerto when the
soloist steps into the spotlight to dazzle listeners with unaccompanied pyrotechnics — except that Elgar, writing in 1909-10 for the great Fritz Kreisler, turns that tradition on its head. This is a cadenza that turns inward rather than outward, inviting listeners to witness a private expressive reckoning instead of gasping in amazement.
That cadenza emerged as the glorious apex — tender, insinuating, sumptuously lovely — in an otherwise workaday performance on Thursday, May 23, by the young Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang with the San Francisco Symphony under guest conductor Krzysztof Urbanski.
It elicited Frang’s most eloquent playing, a surge of melody cast in ripe, robust tones that kept finding new color in seemingly simple material. She built expertly over the course of its long paragraphs, moving from short fragments to longer and more intensely physical exertions. The cadenza does get down to the business of virtuoso flash eventually, but it is Elgar’s genius to connect that showmanship to the more modulated music that comes before it, and Frang negotiated that connection superbly.
To hear the musical flashbacks in this section rendered with such elegance and warmth was almost enough to make you think the entire concerto had gone that way. Unfortunately, what the cadenza actually provided was an idealized, soft-focus memory of an event that had been, at the time, considerably less compelling.
Throughout the first two movements and even into the third, Frang’s string tone was often anemic and underdeveloped, her intonation unreliable (sometimes startlingly so). She often rose with impressive focus to the more vigorous passages, only to relapse immediately afterward into aimlessness and approximation.
In a welcome return to Davies Symphony Hall, Urbanski worked with the orchestra to provide a solid foundation, but they fared better on their own — first with the Overture (1943) of Grazyna Bacewicz, and after intermission with a sleek, crisply turned account of Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony.
Bacewicz, who died in 1969 just short of her 60th birthday, remains one of the great undersung figures of Polish music, the creator of plenty of inventive chamber music and several orchestral works that could certainly stand to be championed. Her Overture, a charming, lightweight bauble that is over practically as soon as it begins, didn’t really slake that thirst.
But in his third visit to Davies, Urbanski’s podium mastery continued to impress and delight. He gave Bacewicz’s music a welcome kinetic charge and kept the orchestra together through its speedy passages, and his pacing in the Mendelssohn was both fleet and generous. He’s a welcome addition to the orchestra’s stable of guest artists.