SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Midori is a violinist capable of lyricism and bravura in equal measure. She makes enterprising programs, and interprets them intelligently. She is also a dignified platform presence, and is praiseworthily tireless in her initiation and support of educational projects. I just wish I liked her playing better.

For the first half of this Seattle Symphony program, the violinist had put together a stimulating combination of baroque, romantic, and contemporary repertoire. The main trouble, alike in Bach’s E-major Concerto, Schubert’s Rondo for violin and orchestra, and Schnittke’s Sonata for violin and chamber orchestra, was that while many beautiful sounds emerged from her superb Guarnerius del Gesù instrument, they were rarely strung together in a truly unbreakable line.

It was unfortunate for the soloist that Julia Fischer, an even younger virtuoso, had played the same Bach concerto here with a visiting orchestra just four months earlier. Fischer covered an equally wide dynamic range, but she made both ends of it work, whereas Midori’s tone faded into vagueness in any passages that were both soft and fast.

The Schubert suffered from the same want of firm projection. And to be successfully presented the Schnittke, a saturnine piece, demands the crisp authority of a violinist like Gidon Kremer, or for that matter like Oleh Krysa, who gave a superb performance of it in Philadelphia a few years ago.

Unfortunate in a different way was the billing on the front cover of the month’s program book, which featured Midori as “Violin superstar”–a deplorable word at the best of times–just below a listing of “Violinist Leila Josefowicz.” If the crass distinction was intended in Midori’s favor, it misfired, for it was Josefowicz that, just a week before, demonstrated true mastery. What price superstardom, indeed?

The second half of the program brought a radical shift of gears, adding the resources of the full orchestra in a perfectly stunning performance of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony. It is a work that, perfunctorily treated, can sound shallow–but not this time. Pacing the work with compelling intensity, Schwarz brought many inner parts into unusually clear balance, even in passages where brilliance verges on brashness. “Who” (to paraphrase Lady Macbeth) “would have thought the old piece to have had so much texture in it?” I have never heard Prokofiev’s Fifth sound so richly polyphonic. And the orchestra, to a man (notably in Christopher Sereque’s and Christopher Olka’s sure-handed shaping of the important clarinet and tuba parts), responded to thrilling effect.

Bernard Jacobson

NB: this review appeared also in the Seattle Times.