Boston Classical Review

Back in 1986, Midori made the front page of The New York Times after a performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade at Tanglewood resulted in two broken E strings and the then-14-year-old playing on three different violins.

To be sure, Thursday night’s recital from the violin virtuoso and pianist Özgür Aydin at Groton Hill Music’s Meadow Hall involved a bit less drama: there were no snapped strings or alternate instruments pressed into service. Even so, Midori’s playing has lost none of its fire or intensity, as was evident across the evening’s traversal of works by Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Francis Poulenc, and Maurice Ravel.

The duo’s first offering, Schumann’s Stücke im Volkston was a late substitution for Che Buford’s Resonances of Spirit. Though programmatically a logical choice, the inclusion meant that the evening’s advertised study of “mourning and lamentation across cultures” became instead a survey of Franco-German keening.

Nevertheless, the Schumann provided the night one of its most obviously folksy points of reference. Completed in 1849, this five-movement suite traffics in the same sort of unbrilliant writing for the soloist that mars the composer’s first two violin sonatas and his Violin Concerto.

Yet on Thursday, Midori navigated its abundant low- and mid-tessitura figurations, not to mention its crunchy double- and triple stops, with aplomb. Though the music is sometimes dour, nothing felt or sounded awkward.

Instead, the violinist’s extraordinary bowing technique ensured that each movement offered strong contrasts of character. The opening “Mit Humor’s” zesty, Romani refrains were countered by the second’s sweetly lyrical turns and the third’s beautifully projected double stops.

Aydin dispatched the keyboard part with equal vigor, the stormy dialogues in “Nicht zu rasch” and the finale’s sinewy passagework, especially, coming across with biting style.

The pair’s interpretation of Brahms’s Violin Sonata in G major was cut from similar cloth, though here their playing turned, for much of the work’s thirty-minute duration, decisively reflective and inward.

This meant that the Sonata’s quiet moments—the velvety opening of the Vivace, the devotional peroration of the Adagio, the finale’s unsettled refrains—sang with absorbing focus. At the same time, the music’s climaxes, each of them boldly etched, stood out strongly by way of contrast.

Throughout, Aydin’s delivery of the Sonata’s busy textures, especially the low-register ones, was a model of rich clarity. Further, he and Midori consistently managed a remarkable degree of tonal and articulative unanimity between their instruments.

One might have appreciated a bit more of the last in the duo’s account of Poulenc’s sometimes-charming, sometimes-harrowing Sonata: the piano occasionally dominated its opening movement’s spastic, violent episodes.

Regardless, the pair imbued this unsettling score’s sultry, Lorca-inspired Intermezzo with Iberian warmth, and they channeled the proper measure of dynamics and expression in the concluding Presto tragico. Here, a demonic moto perpetuo and elegant melodic phrases Edith Piaf might have sung culminate in a clangorous denouement. On Thursday, that latter section rang with ominous, shattering menace.

Lucien Garban’s lovely arrangement of Ravel’s Kaddish, though, brought the evening back from the brink of the abyss. Afterwards, Midori let her hair down (figuratively) and stomped her feet (literally) through the first page or so of Tzigane. Premiered 101 years ago next month, Ravel’s rhapsodic ode to gypsy fiddling remains the first and last word in pure violinistic technique; its keyboard accompaniment isn’t for the faint of heart, either.

Thursday’s rendition, often brilliant and periodically frenetic, showcased two artists at the top of their respective games, reveling in the joy of instrumental pyrotechnics. Their enchanting encore of Pauline Viardot’s “Hai Luli,” on the other hand, reminded that sometimes the most powerful statements are simple ones rendered without fuss or pretension.

The program will be repeated 8 p.m. Friday at Jordan Hall. celebrityseries.org

Posted in Performances

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