Boston Classical Review

Violinist Julia Fischer and pianist Jan Lisiecki performed a recital for the Celebrity Series Friday night at Jordan  Hall.

Perhaps it was inevitable that violinist Julia Fischer and pianist Jan Lisiecki would team up for a duo recital. Both musicians are artists of the first rank and masters of their respective instruments. (Fischer is an accomplished pianist as well as a world-class violinist). Both possess deep affinities for the standard canon.

So it happened that Friday night found the two together at Jordan Hall in the fourth concert of a six-city American tour. If anything, the risk involved in their appearance—the debut for each player on a Celebrity Series program—was that the partnership’s many similarities might somehow cancel out each other’s individuality in performances of sonatas by Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann.

On the contrary, sparks and fireworks flew pretty much from the get-go.

Fischer’s command of her instrument is total. The Munich-born musician’s bow arm is a miracle of discipline: every phrase, articulation, tone color, and dynamic is utterly controlled and applied with utmost musical intelligence. The precision of her left hand is no less impressive.

For his part, Lisiecki’s ability to tease out textures and colors on the keyboard is breathtaking. The Canadian pianist sometimes gets a touch carried away with things: balances in Friday’s first half might have benefited from having his Steinway’s lid open on half-stick instead of full.

Nevertheless, the pair’s synergy was evident from the downbeat of Mozart’s Violin Sonata No. 26 in B-flat-major. Here, the pearl-toned purity and moments of beguiling inwardness offered a nod to old-school, Apollonian Mozart performance practice. Yet the duo’s rhythmic clarity, close attention to dynamic contrasts, and habit of leaning into the beat meant that this early effort also came across with a good bit of urgency.

The Allegro was well-directed and lively, its plays of light and shadow subtly underlined and stormy spots rightly explosive. In the Andantino, Fischer delivered the mid-movement double-stops with compelling urgency while Lisiecki’s contributions were beautifully weighted. Meantime, the concluding Rondo, spirited and graceful, seemed to anticipate Beethoven with its gleeful exaggerations of dynamics and articulations.

Those elements provided a neat bridge into the evening’s account of the latter’s Violin Sonata No. 5. Subtitled “Spring” by an anonymous publisher, this F-major score stands among Beethoven’s sunnier major works.

Friday’s rendition was certainly that in the outer movements and a droll Scherzo. The former’s lyrical spots were ever serene and shapely, the Rondo’s refrains coming across with becoming lightness and charm. Meantime, the Adagio’s undulating shifts of color unfolded with hypnotic direction.

The sheer range of sonority Lisiecki drew from the piano was astonishing with parts of the opening Allegro sounded virtually orchestral; unfortunately, in some of those big moments, Lisiecki virtually swamped Fischer’s violin.

The night’s most consistent balances obtained, ironically, in the duo’s interpretation of Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 2. Allegedly written because the composer was unhappy with his first installment in the genre, this stormy, D-minor contribution has, historically, proven less popular with violinists, perhaps on account of its unflashy, low-lying fiddle part.

At Jordan, though, Fischer and Lisiecki made the case that perhaps Schumann knew best. This is music of struggle, drama, and poetry; it shouldn’t sound easy. Its rewards are real but hard-earned. For all the busy-ness of the music—and the Sonata often feels like an intense, thirty-minute workout—the little things really count, like the third movement’s out-of-nowhere four bars of sul ponticello.

On Friday, that spot came out with enchanting understatement, like the moon briefly peeking from behind clouds on a dark night: blink and you miss it. Yet it was just one of a number of striking small moments in a performance that added up to a dynamic gestalt.

In the volcanic first movement, its fervent syncopations and exchanges of gestures—like the piano’s rumbling, late-movement echo of a little violin fillip—unfurled with inexorable, tempestuous purpose. In the “Sehr lebhaft,” the music’s contrasts of character, sometimes punchy and driven, sometimes warm and singing, were all tied together by Lisiecki’s resonant pianism.

Fischer’s playing in the “Leise, einfach” section was a model of unsentimental directedness. The violinist’s mid- and late-movement double stops projected beautifully and without any sense of being forced through the music’s thick textures, while her turns to the upper reaches of the D and G strings were sumptuous but never overdone.

In the finale, she and Lisiecki tore through the music’s blistering runs, finding a measure of triumph in its major-key coda, a victory that wore the spirit of hard-won struggle on its sleeve.

That aura carried into the duo’s first encore, Brahms’s “F-A-E” Scherzo, whose billowing gestures are cut from a similar cloth as that of Schumann. The second, the “Mélodie” from Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir d’un lieu cher,  offered an oasis of beauty, purity, and repose.

The Celebrity Series presents Zlata Chochieva playing music by Bach, Schumann, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, and Mendelssohn 7:30 p.m. on April 1 at Pickman Hall. celebrityseries.org

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