SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Franck, Mozart, Ysaÿe, Ives, Brahms: Hilary Hahn, violin; Valentina Lisitsa, piano:  Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, Calif. 16.10.2007 (HS)

Violinist Hilary Hahn certainly doesn't short-change her listeners. For her 2 1/2-hour recital in the University of California's Cal Performances series, she played five full-scale sonatas, all in a sincerely lyrical mode, and squeezed in a brief encore of Prokofiev's sardonic little march from The Love for Three Oranges.

That's about 50 percent more heavy lifting than most soloists will do in an evening, and in the end, perhaps about 20 percent more than would have been ideal. She even made a joking reference to not wanting to "inflict another lyrical sonata" on the audience when she announced the encore.

I doubt if anyone felt particularly put upon. Hahn is a prodigious musician. She plays with remarkable technical mastery, but that's not unsual for soloists in the 20s. It's her fierce intelligence and beautifully crafted emotional responses in the music that set her apart. Ukrainian-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa matches her well. Not  quite so incisive a player as Hahn, she has her strengths, spinning out rippling arpeggios with consummate deftness and displaying welcome rhythmic vitality.

If there was a fault in the program, it was that none of these sonatas, not even Ives', budged very far from rich, lovely music dense with detail. No tempo exceeded allegro. Few dissonances disturbed the landscape. It was all just, well, nice.

One effect of this sameness was that it allowed me to appreciate one aspect of Hahn's playing that I hadn't paid much attention to—her bow arm. Most violinists make subtle differences between one phrase and the next simply with slight changes in pressure, where they place the bow on the strings, how they turn the bow. But it's what she brings to the music with these choices that's so satisfying. She always seemed to be making exactly the right choices. The left hand fingers the notes, but the right hand really makes the music come alive.

Hahn opened with the expansive Franck Sonata in A major, giving the sentimental melody in the first movement a bit of steel to contrast with Lisitsa's gauzy pianissimo arpeggios. If Hahn's intonation missed uncharacteristically in the finale on one or two exposed notes, the glory of that big tune in the finale came through in spades.

Lisitsa's soft-edged playing brought a level of sweetness to the Mozart Sonata No. 26 in B-flat major, especially in the gently singing Andantino. And Hahn concluded the first half with Ysaÿe's Sonata No. 5 for Unaccompanied Violin in G major, building from a gentle zephyr in the opening of L'Aurore to a hurricane of complex structure by the movement's end. The Danse Rustique ambled amiably until its finger-busting variations toward the finish, dazzlingly handled.

Charles Ives built his Sonata No. 3 from hymn tunes, as he did so many of his works, and Hahn infused them with a surprising sense of Romantic ardor that almost converted them into love songs. This is not the spiky, densely innovative Ives. It's the composer with his collar open and a gentle breeze rustling his hair, the music as friendly as could be. Hahn and Lisitsa seemed to own the music. It was the best thing on the program.

By the time they got to Brahms' Sonata No. 2 in A major, however, I  was cantabile-ed and amabile-ed out, so I probably did not appreciate it as much I could if it had contrasted with some other kind of music. Nonetheless it was well played. And (here's the intelligence at work, in some small way) it brought the concert to a close in the same key in which it started.

Still, this program was like a menu of creamy dishes. We could have used a salad or a grilled dish for contrast. The zippy little Prokofiev march tasted like a tart sorbet to finish things off.

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