After Bach: music by Bach, Fišer, Bartók, Tickmayer, and Piazzolla: Gidon Kremer, violin, Andrius Zlabys, piano, Andrei Pushkarev, percussion, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 15.11.2006 (BJ)

 

 

A mere few days after Leonidas Kavakos had taken the Seattle audience by storm with his superb interpretation of Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto, another great violinist, Gidon Kremer, blew into town and treated us to an equally dazzling performance of the composer’s Sonata for Solo Violin. This is an altogether tougher nut than the concerto for both listeners and performer to crack, but Kremer showed himself fully up to the challenge, offering playing that, if less richly sensuous than Kavakos’s, was equally masterly in its command of style and of the many problems of intonation, rhythm, and multiple stopping set by the piece.

Kremer, indeed, continues to provide the kind of intellectual challenge blended with sheer musical insight that has been his trademark now for more than three decades. This program, titled “After Bach,” was typical of his questing mind, moving as it did from Bach himself by way of Luboš Fišer, Bartók, and a certain Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer (about whom the only available information seems to be that he is a native of Serbia or Montenegro) to Piazzolla. The violinist and his two young and gifted collaborators were deployed in varying combinations. Lithuanian pianist Andrius Zlabys impressed with his thoughtful and inward treatment of two Bach chorale preludes, and Ukrainian percussionist Andrei Pushkarev had his solo spot with his own vibraphone arrangements of three Two-Part Inventions, “in the mood” respectively of jazzmen Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, and Dave Brubeck. Pushkarev, this time on timpani and tubular bells, joined Kremer in Fišer’s Crux, a Bach-related piece that seemed to me a shade pretentious, with its tightly chromatic, slowly crescendo-ing timpani line pitted against a highly rhetorical and seemingly unrelated violin part. Tickmayer’s Three Variations on Bach’s Brunnquell aller Güter, an altogether lighter affair, provided pleasant if unremarkable entertainment.

But entertainment of an altogether more vivid character came with the last two pieces on the official program: Piazzolla’s Grand Tango, played in Sofia Gubaidulina’s arrangement for violin and piano, and a set of Milongas by the same composer, which made the most of all three performers’ virtuosity, warmth, and sense of fun. The first of two encores brought more Piazzolla, in the shape of La muerte del ángel. Then, with characteristic wit and neatness, Kremer rounded off a program that had begun with the Fuga canonica from Bach’s Musical Offering by ending with the Canon perpetuus from the same work. Thus the circle was completed, and the audience at once edified and obviously delighted.

 

 

Bernard Jacobson