Tribute at Menlo to violin luminary
For a common thread running through the history of 19th century German music, you could certainly do worse than the great violinist Joseph Joachim. He was an early champion of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto (performing it in public at 12), a student of Mendelssohn, and an intimate friend of Schumann and Brahms, who wrote some of their most important works for him.
The influence of Joachim — his traditionalist sensibility, his astonishing virtuosity, his Zelig-like ubiquity — was the guiding principle behind Sunday’s concert of the Music@Menlo chamber music festival in the Center for Performing Arts at Menlo-Atherton. Even in performances that were occasionally a little rough-and-ready, the imposing figure of this musician shone through.
Audiences even got a glimpse of Joachim the composer, albeit a tiny one, in the form of his short Romance for Violin and Piano, Op. 2, No. 1. One doesn’t want to read too much into a piece of teenage juvenilia, but this bauble — a sweet, entirely conventional stretch of melody tenderly played by violinist Yura Lee and pianist Juho Pohjonen — suggests pretty strongly that Joachim’s importance as a performer was paramount.
By contrast, the program included several strong-limbed, even tempestuous works by Joachim’s composer colleagues (not all of them, admittedly, written with Joachim or even his violin in mind). Schumann’s Piano Trio No. 3 in G Minor, for example, blaz-
es away in a full flood of dense counterpoint and fervid technical exertions; Sunday’s performance, in which Lee was joined by cellist Keith Robinson and pianist Gilbert Kalish, struggled at times to corral the composer’s rhetoric into manageable form.
But in more well-behaved repertoire, the performers captured both the serenity and the emotional riches of the early Romantic sensibility. Robinson and pianist Gloria Chien collaborated on a gorgeous account of Mendelssohn’s “Song Without Words,” Op. 109, imbuing the music with a combination of delicacy and sonic weight, and hornist Radovan Vlatkovic, also in partnership with Chien, summoned the dark expressive power of Schumann’s rarely heard “Adagio and Allegro,” Op. 70.
The evening’s crowning glory, though, came at the end, when Vlatkovic and Pohjonen welcomed violinist Paul Huang onstage for a brilliant rendition of Brahms’ Horn Trio, Op. 40. This was a summation of all the themes that had been flitting around since the beginning.
The extraordinary range of Joachim’s violin technique was given fresh voice by Huang’s nimble and endlessly responsive playing, especially in the keening stillness of the slow movement and the burst of liberation that marks the transition to the finale. Vlatkovic and Pohjonen made athletic, often fiery contributions, and the entirety brought the program to a splendid conclusion.