Violinist Alexi Kenney
Violinist Alexi Kenney Lensic Performing Arts Center, Oct. 22
The violinist Alexi Kenney presented an outstanding recital last Sunday at the Lensic Performing Arts Center, leaving one to regret only that the hall was less full than the artistry merited. The Santa Fe Symphony is exploring a new model of presenting some of its soloists wearing two hats — featured in concerted works on a symphonic concert, then again as a recitalist. A schedule conflict prevented my hearing Kenney play a Haydn concerto and the Dvoˇrák Romance the prior weekend, but his recital encompassed remarkable variety all on its own.
He began with Bach’s E-major Partita, the most beloved of the composer’s unaccompanied violin compositions. So familiar a work can easily zip past without making much impression, but Kenney’s interpretation proved arresting throughout, not so much calling attention to the performer as inviting concentration on the details of the score. He is an up-to-date violinist who possesses the crackerjack technique we expect from young string-playing “contenders” (he was born in 1994), but who has also digested revelations from the historically informed side of the aisle. This paid valuable dividends in the Loure (the second movement), which can come across as gawky if not invested with inflection that is sympathetic to its distinctive dance cadence. It also infused the two Minuets with exceptional character; here, Kenney kept the pulse flowing even while elaborating the lines with graceful footnotes of feathery ornamentation. His Bach-playing displayed the basic tenets of his violinistic personality: unerringly attractive tone (sweet but not cloying), clarity of articulation, and lucidity of details. His musical personality is founded on precision and elegance, more reminiscent of an Arthur Grumiaux or a Christian Tetzlaff than of the more accustomed broad-spectrum players.
His style was supremely suited to George Crumb’s Four Nocturnes (Night Music II), in which he was assisted impressively by pianist Renana Gutman. Composed in 1964, this is a relatively early work by Crumb, who turned eighty-eight this past week and is still composing works that, like the Nocturnes, combine vivid ideas and painstaking economy. These characteristics overlap with Kenney’s proclivities, and the result was as magical as one might expect. He and Gutman offered a tightly coordinated reading, drawing delicious tones from their instruments. Crumb’s modernistic demands — tapping percussively on the violin, plucking or brushing the piano strings — came across not as self-conscious effects but rather as “extended techniques” in the best sense of the term, truly enlarging the instruments’ capabilities in a natural and deeply musical way. The four short movements, which owe something of their unsettling spirit to Bartók (not to mention their title), are bound together by a tiny, tick-tocking melodic cell that returned at intervals, a reassuring presence in the shadowy landscape. The second of the nocturnes, marked scorrevole (“flowing” or “scurrying”), was rendered with the lightness of leaves rustling along an autumn sidewalk.
Bach and Crumb invite different approaches from a violinist, but the ensuing work, Schubert’s C-major Fantasy, clarified how Kenney employs some of the same touches to highlight moments of even a solid 19th-century classic. Though it generally eschewed bulky tone and high volume, Kenney’s playing was highly expressive. He doled out vibrato when it suited his purpose and reined it in for tighter tension. This is one of Schubert’s discursive pieces, and it probably includes at its center a couple of variations too many on his own song “Sei mir gegrüsst”; but it is what it is, and Kenney and Gutman kept their enthusiasm going through it all.
Another unaccompanied piece opened the second half: Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Lachen verlernt, composed in 2002. Its title, which means “Laughing Unlearned,” is paraphrased from Schoenberg’s
Pierrot lunaire (so, really from Otto Erich Hartleben’s German translation of Albert Giraud’s French texts for that cycle); but it seemed to me, at least in this performance, that the opening was more a memory of Debussy’s Syrinx or Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. In any case, Salonen’s somber piece unrolls as a chaconne, its fundamental harmonic pattern repeated over and over as the figuration changes above, culminating in crazed arpeggiation, like Bach run amok. One sensed here an interpretation that will continue to deepen. A passacaglia — cousin to a chaconne, also based on a repeating ostinato — resurfaced in the finale of the recital’s concluding work, the 1917 Violin Sonata in B minor of Ottorino Respighi. He is most famous for his orchestral tone poems (The Pines of Rome, for example) or neo-Renaissance gems (like Ancient Airs and Dances), but this is a far less familiar score, and I can’t think of any reason that should change. The players did proud to its post-Brahmsian expanses (think Zemlinsky or Busoni) — languid in the slow movement, stormy in the finale — but by the end it seemed like a lot of work for limited payback. — James M. Keller
Alexi Kenney’s musical personality is founded on precision and elegance.