A Stylized Student Recital

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The New York Sun

David Aaron Carpenter is on his way to becoming a fine violist. A big step was winning the competition of the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation in 2006, and part of his booty was Monday’s concert at Weill Hall. He presented a varied program and demonstrated his comfort level in several differing musical styles. His level of accuracy is above average and his dedication seems sincere. At the end of the day, however, this was nothing more than a student recital.

Mr. Carpenter began with a showy piece, the “Elegie, Op. 30” of Henri Vieuxtemps. The work relies heavily on the lushly deep alto range of the instrument, but Mr. Carpenter’s tone was not burnished enough for such salon style Romanticism. Pianist Julien Quentin, attempting to straddle that difficult line between partner and accompanist, played extremely well throughout the evening and often, as in this sentimental essay, dominated a bit too much.

Paul Hindemith wrote sonatas for every conceivable instrument, even the marching band version of the French horn known as the mellophone. But Hindemith was himself a violist and reserved much of his most profound writing for his own axe. Mr. Carpenter chose the “Sonata Op. 25, No. 4,” and traversed its spiky opening movement adroitly. But he did not achieve the proper singing tone for the “Sehr langsame Viertel,” and was not as intensely passionate or savage in the final movement as was his keyboardist.

An unusual gambit was including a work for four instruments. Mr. Carpenter took the lead in the “Guitar Quartet No. 15,” a pleasant if inconsequential piece by Niccolo Paganini, a great violinist, and the first of the rock star classical soloists. Paganini also dabbled in the viola, commissioning Hector Berlioz to pen “Harold in Italy” and then pronouncing it unplayable. There was a palpably under-rehearsed quality to this foursome, but Mr. Carpenter kept it light and endearingly fragile.

Hindemith taught at Yale, as did Quincy Porter, a Connecticut Yankee who, like Charles Ives, studied there with Horatio Parker. In the best performance of the night, Mr. Carpenter put his all into the “Suite for Viola Alone,” a densely contrapuntal and moving essay with many challenges, especially of the harmonic variety, for the fiddler. Based only on this evening, it seems Mr. Carpenter does better when left to his own devices.

Johannes Brahms had embarked on a well-deserved retirement when he began to compose again for the clarinetist of the Meiningen Orchestra, Richard Muehlfeld. The two sonatas he forged during this period were published for viola and piano as well, as he was ever mindful, as Mozart had been, of the closeness in color between the reed instrument and the bowed one. Messrs. Carpenter and Quentin took a turn at the F Minor, but only reinforced the simple fact that this valedictory music is virtually never interpreted with the correct sense of nostalgia or gravitas by young performers. In fact, it is not too much to say that the revered LP version with William Primrose and Rudolph Firkusny could not have been produced until these gentlemen were fully matured. Still, it was a noble effort that, with a little more lyricism, could blossom into a satisfying future performance.

Those who bemoan the lack of attendance by young people at classical concerts will be happy to know that this event was filled to capacity, and that the average age of the crowd appeared to be well below 35.


The New York Sun

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