Two Talented Siblings, Playing to the Rafters
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Carnegie Hall is divided into three parts, a fact apparently still lost on many concert promoters and programmers. Monday evening’s recital by siblings Gil and Orly Shaham is a good case in point. An entire first half devoted to Mozart violin music written for the Paris salon really belonged within the intimate acoustical bosom of the
Weill space. If ticket sales were the issue, then the proceedings would not have suffered too badly by being held down in the Zankel basement. Scheduling such petite music in such a formidable cave as Isaac Stern Auditorium, however, was simply foolhardy. Except that the Shahams, through some act of auditory necromancy, pulled it off.
The key to this music surviving its environs was the brother and sister team’s refreshing disregard for proper performance practice. Both Shahams felt free to indulge in highly romantic, albeit wholly inaccurate, dynamics to make their voices heard in the upper balcony. From the violin, this type of shining silver tone and wildly fluctuating volume levels would have been simply shocking to audiences in 1778. From the piano, anything even remotely resembling these crescendi would have been physically impossible. But period considerations be damned; as long as disbelief could be suspended, this was lively and interesting music-making.
At first glance, the inclusion of three complete violin sonatas from the same set seemed a recipe for boredom. These pieces are actually quite dissimilar in character, however, if not in structure or sound. The A Major is not really a sonata at all, but more of what Beethoven would have called a “sonata quasi una fantasia” – two movements that explore one theme. The work is actually a piano solo with some violinistic ornamentation, and so Ms. Shaham was first up. Once we all accepted her 21st-century approach, she actually did quite well, although she has the bad habit of not uniformly enunciating the individual notes in an extended run, introducing rhythmic liberties certainly not in the printed score.
The second on this program, the G Major, is a rollicking affair, reminiscent of those bizarrely out-of-tune hunting pieces that father Leopold Mozart composed for horn quartet. Here Mr. Shaham came to the forefront, narrating the excitement for all that it was worth. There was actually quite a bit of delicate coordination between performers in this adventurous piece.
I have heard Mr. Shaham often and have always found him a bit distant. Last season, for example, three violinists performed the Berg concerto in New York within just a few weeks of one another. The Christian Tetzlaff and Pinchas Zukerman versions were both highly emotive, but the Shaham – with the San Francisco Symphony – was cold and dispassionate, the composer’s descriptions of the stages of grief that he experienced upon the death of Manon Gropius analyzed as clinical rather than humanistic phenomena. This was the same treatment afforded to Wolfgang’s experiment in minor-key transitions: polished technique but little empathetic substance.
The evening was a fortuitous one for those students who hang about outside of Carnegie hoping for a free ticket to enjoy the second half of the program, as many patrons, noticing that the music after intermission was all from the dreaded 20th century, left the hall early. A pity, as things picked up once Prokofiev was introduced. The main work was the Violin Sonata No. 1, written for David Oistrakh. This is indeed the actual violin sonata, not the flute sonata that sometimes masquerades as the No. 2. Mr. Shaham was reasonably successful as a colorist, sounding mysterious in the first part of the piece and spidery in the later passages of the Andante assai, but he never quite nailed the unique sound that makes this work so memorable. Having heard Kyung-Wha Chung perform it live, I am, however, a bit jaded.
Ms. Shaham was perhaps more impressive than her brother in this realization. Prokofiev was one of those large-handed pianists who wrote seemingly impossible passages for the keyboard so that he himself could navigate them exclusively. In fact, when he first heard Dmitri Mitropoulos perform and simultaneously conduct his third concerto so magnificently in Paris, the composer, who had himself toured with the piece, reportedly remarked rather peevishly that “I guess I will have to write another for myself.” Had he been in the audience for this program, he might have been given pause as well.
But somehow these technically solid renditions never quite connected, and perhaps the soundest judgment of this duo concertante was supplied by the audience. Their applause was always respectful this night, but never enthusiastic.