So I've Heard

The name of Bright Sheng has come into circulation lately. Born in Shanghai in
1955, he came to New York in 1982, has had performances and commissions by
orchestras here and abroad, is currently composer-in-residence at the Chicago
Lyric Opera, and assisted Leonard Bernstein on that composer’s “Arias and
Barcarolles.” At 35, he has made his mark.
At Monday night’s concert by XTET {cq}, the splendid aggregation of freelance
musicians with a special bent toward new music, Bright Sheng’s “Three Poems
from the Sung Dynasty” was by all odds the evening’s knockout piece. Three
ancient poems are set by the composer into a chamber ensemble brilliantly used.
The atmosphere is less Oriental, more universal. Reminiscences of Stravinsky
and Boulez float across the horizon. The songs were gorgeously sung by Dasietta
{cq} Kim, and beautifully framed by the ensemble under Donald Crockett, in 20-
or-so minutes of magical, strong music.
The Bright Sheng songs, and lesser works by David Ocker and Donald R. Davis —
most of it busy-busy writing without much focus — were framed by two
“contemporary” works of the past. Stravinsky’s amusing cycle of pseudo-
folksongs called “Pribaoutki” (also magically sung by Dasietta Kim) came at
the start. Aaron Copland’s Sextet of 1937 sent the crowd home happy.
An extraordinary work, that Copland. He wrote it as a “portable” version of
his 1933 “Short Symphony,” partly out of justified fear that the orchestral
version might be too difficult for conductors and orchestras of the time.
(Serge Koussevitzky and Leopold Stokowski had both scheduled and then canceled
performances, probably for that very reason.)
Today this music arouses fewer fears, although it’s interesting to note that
there is only one recording of the symphony in the current catalog — an
excellent one, under Dennis Russell Davies — compared to two of the sextet.
Still, the daring is as obvious in the work now as when it was new: most of all
the driving, quirky motion (nicely described in Roger Lebow’s program notes as
“street-wise, jazz-besotted rhythms”). The slow movement, with those arching,
intense melodies that came to represent Copland’s best melodic style, is pure
and beautiful, perhaps even more so in the chamber version.
An exhilarating ending, then, to a concert with many rewarding moments. In a
city well-stocked with skillful new-music ensembles, XTET ranks near the
top.

Back in 1985, at the start of his leadership of the Los Angeles Philharmonic,
Andre Previn guided the orchestra through several Haydn and Mozart performances
that linger in the memory. Those fond recollections were rekindled on Friday
night at the Music Center, as Previn and the orchestra devoted an entire
program to a loving celebration of the glory of Mozart.
Three works constituted the program: the Sinfonia Concertante (K. 364),and the
Symphony No. 39 (K. 543) — absolute masterpieces both — and the D-major
Divertimento (K. 251), a lesser work but a charmer nonetheless. As is only
proper, Previn used a reduced orchestra all evening: three stands of first
violins (against the customary six) for the Divertimento and the Sinfonia, four
for the Symphony. It was a lovely sound he drew, one which honored the essence
of Mozart’s orchestral writing, the constant dialog between strings and
woodwinds.
What an extraordinary work, that Sinfonia Concertante! Young Uck Kim Young
is his first name [F/L] was the violin soloist, Heichiro Ohyama the violist.
Together with Previn’s beautifully shaded orchestral support, they
reconstructed the harrowing picture this music presents: the young Mozart at a
sorrowful moment in his life, transforming himself in this work into the
supreme expressive master he would now become. Can anyone remain unmoved by
those poignant last measures of the slow movement? Previn and his soloists made
that extremely difficult.
That Sinfonia comes at the start of Mozart’s mature mastery; the Symphony No.
39 comes close to the end; the juxtaposition of the two works (both in E flat,
if that news matters) made for an interesting study in growth. Mozart composed
no orchestral work more exuberant, more rich in the interplay of orchestral
color, than this Symphony. From the full orchestral might in the slow
introduction to the giggling duet for clarinets in the minuet (giggled
enchantingly by Michelle Zukovsky and David Howard), the work proclaims a fact
sometimes overlooked: that Mozart, among the other facets of his genius, was
the greatest orchestrator of them all.
This Previn and his cut-down orchestra proved beyond doubt in this altogether
splendid concert. The smaller pleasures of the Divertimento were also much
enhanced by David Weiss’ splendid quacking of the oboe solos. A fine evening
for the Philharmonic, and for Mozart as well.

At the risk of sounding obsessive, Tuesday night’s “Chamber Music in Historic
Sites” concert was one in a long series for which “perfection” is the most
accurate description.
The venue was beautiful; so was the music; so was the way the two elements
seemed made for one another. The matter at hand was a program of Claudio
Monteverdi, music’s first true innovative genius. The performers were the
members of Andrew Parrott’s Taverner Consort in their first Los Angeles
appearance. Their music, and their singing, made the clean, noble outlines of
the Wilshire Christian Church, in downtown Los Angeles, seem even more
beautiful this once.
The music was entirely drawn from Monteverdi’s vast compendium of sacred pieces
composed for St. Marks in Venice in 1640, marvelously rich settings of psalm
verses and other biblical texts for vocal ensemble with instrumental
underpinning, interspersed with Gregorian chants sung by solo voices
unaccompanied. The expressive range here is extraordinary.
Monteverdi, already the supreme operatic and madrigal composer of his time,
here brings his sublime dramatic gifts to the underlining of words of passion
and exultation in the liturgical repertory. It was fascinating, for example, to
trace in several selections on this program the setting of the one word
“misericordia” (“mercy”), always lit with a deep, mysterious burst of
innovative harmony, always different.
Parrott is one of the long list of British conductors concerned with
“authentic” musical interpretations. He and his group have a long list of
recordings to their credit, including these Monteverdi pieces and a recent,
jubilant performance of Handel’s “Israel in Egypt.” His views on authenticity
are rational and enlightened; his players use old-style instruments but aren’t
afraid of an expressive vibrato when it shines a light on the music. His
singers — eight in number for this particular program — are, similarly,
unafraid to sound like what they are: skillful and dedicated, thoroughly modern
artists.
The result was authenticity in the best sense: a glowing, rich tribute to one
of music’s astonishing creators. The program ran without intermission; seldom
have 70 minutes seemed so short.

To the list of once-renowned composers currently and undeservedly in limbo, the
name of Bohuslav Martinu surely belongs. During his time in America as a
refugee from Hitler’s holocaust, Martinu was much performed; it seemed as if
orchestras waited in line to commission new scores from him. Now his devotees,
though ardent, are more widely scattered.
Lawrence Foster, who conducted Martinu’s “Frescoes of Piero Della Francesca”
at the start of Thursday’s Los Angeles Philharmonic concert at the Music
Center, is clearly one of these. He is, in fact, one of our most valuable
pleaders of lost or forgotten causes, as his recent recording of Enesco’s
“Oedipe” also shows.
The music dates from 1953, six years before Martinu’s death. Although the
inspiration is the artwork by the great Italian painter, the music is pure
Martinu: the lushness of his Czech ancestry peppered by a harmonic language
reminiscent of Stravinsky. The orchestral coloration is applied with a sure
hand worthy of the great Piero himself; still, the music itself vanishes rather
quickly from the memory. More bluntly put, there is sweetness here, but no
shape.
If anything, the meanderings of Martinu were shamed most of all by the
evening’s final work, the wonderful G-major Symphony (No. 8 in the
authoritative listing) by his Czech forbear Antonin Dvorak, music set down with
the same glistening orchestral palette, but infinitely more tender and
memorable. If these adjectives did not entirely apply to Foster’s performance,
in which the first and last movements seemed needlessly brutal, the shape of
the music itself was still discernible.
Among the echoes enshrined in the walls of the Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler
Pavilion is the ghost of a supremely wise performance under Carlo Maria Giulini
from 1982. It immediately dooms any subsequent attempt.
The splendid young Yefim Bronfman was the evening’s soloist, in the C-minor
Piano Concerto of Mozart (K. 491), a miracle among miracles. Something seemed
to be lacking here, too, however. Bronfman, ordinarily an intelligent hand at
preserving the proportions in these mature Mozart concertos, here seemed out of
touch with Foster and, thus, with the orchestra. The piano was too far front,
sonically speaking; the marvelous interplay between soloist and orchestra
seemed, this time, to be carried out across too vast a distance. Some beautiful
playing, from both piano and the orchestral woodwinds, seemed wasted this time
around.

When did any of us last hear William Walton’s Viola Concerto in live
performance? Probably a lifetime or two ago; concertos for viola are rare birds
indeed. That made Yuri Bashmet’s supremely beautiful performance of the work,
with Andrew Davis conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Music Center
on Thursday night, all the more miraculous, all the more welcome.
Writing of Walton’s work when it was new, in 1929, the essayist Donald Tovey
could see “no limits to what may be expected of the tone-poet who created
it.” That sense of omnipotence remains in the work. Not particularly daring in
its musical language — Walton never was, in fact — the concerto is a
remarkably satisfying essay in a warm, intensely lyric manner that expresses
great thinking with the simplest gestures.
The concerto only lasts about 20 minutes, but its progression — from the long,
haunting melodic lines of the opening slow movement, through the garrulous
scherzo, to the finale that recedes into dark shadows at the end — is the work
of a sure master. Tovey’s recognition of its qualities was keen, but it could
actually be argued that this early work persists as Walton’s masterpiece.
The young Bashmet is a wonder. Adept as a soloist, chamber-music participant
and, recently, conductor, he looks like a romantic hero out of Pushkin and
plays in a similar manner. The elegance of his phrasing, his absolute command
of the mellowness that lies at the heart of his instrument: these were the
elements that ennobled his work in the important Walton work — and, as well,
in an unimportant brief Telemann concerto at the start.
Andrew Davis is no stranger here, in his earlier capacity as head of the
Toronto Symphony and currently as music director of the Glyndebourne Festival
and the BBC Symphony. A sober, correct musician rather than a spellbinding one,
he got the orchestra through a clean, classic, refined reading of Stravinsky’s
Symphony in C, and a rather unruly one of that composer’s “Firebird” excerpts
in the suite fashioned in 1919.
It could be, of course, that the vulgarity of the “Firebird” performance was
preordained, coming as it did after the serene good sense of the Walton
concerto. It was, therefore, one piece too many on the program; less might have
been more.

Last season Peter Serkin, most intrepid and interesting of all American
pianists, embarked on a truly brave mission. He commissioned short new works
from a dozen major composers around the world, and toured the country with a
program consisting of these works and nothing more. He gave the program at
Royce Hall in December, 1989, and was cheered by an equally intrepid audience.
For this year’s tour Serkin has culled three works from that program, and
worked them in around other music by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Chopin. This
was his recital offering on Tuesday night at the Music Center, and again the
audience stayed to cheer. The motivations behind the concert were exactly
right; deserving new works should be allowed to stand beside standard repertory
composers, not quarantined in all-contemporary concerts.
Two of the three new works were indeed, if memory serves, the best of the
bunch: Oliver Knussen’s tough, gritty Variations, Opus 24, and Alexander
Goehr’s “…in real time,” full of charm and wit that outweigh the dense
numerological plan attached to the work by the composer. The third, Peter
Lieberson’s Debussy-derived “Breeze of Delight,” seemed unsubstantial by
comparison.
Setting the new music in a sort of context, Serkin chose some out-of-the-way
works by familiar composers: three of the organ Chorale-Preludes, transcribed
for piano, that were to be Johannes Brahms’ last work; the Opus 126 Bagatelles
of Beethoven; the F-major Piano Sonata that Mozart cobbled together from two
movements composed here and a rondo from there; the garrulous, little-known
Bolero of Chopin (with two Chopin Etudes and a Mazurka as encores).
Enterprising program-building this, although that’s not the saying that
everything worked. Neither the woolly Brahms pieces nor the jagged, unruly
Beethoven pieces challenged the best in the pianist; the Beethoven in
particular seemed rather tame in relationship to its fund of wildness.
The Mozart, on the other hand, was the evening’s real triumph. The work is
seldom played; perhaps its dual origin arouses suspicion. It is actually very
much of a piece, three strong and well-planned movements, each a different kind
of venture. into serious counterpoint. Mozart at the time was in the process
of discovering and devouring the music of J. S. Bach, and this deep, powerful
music, with its ravishing slow movement and its strange experiments in piano
sonority at the end, makes that clear. Trust Peter Serkin to make his every
visit here a voyage of discovery.

Among the many good reasons for looking in on the latest chapter in the ongoing family picnic known as “The Godfather,” musical matters rank high. Even in the two previous episodes the surge and onrush of events always seem to foreshadow some as-yet-unwritten violent musical melodrama from the hand of a Puccini or Mascagni. In “Godfather 3” that unwritten opera gets written, as the red-hot measures of Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana” counterpoint the horrific bloodbath that brings Francis Ford Coppola’s chronicle to its smoky conclusion.These scenes from “Cavalleria” are shown as taking place at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, as Tony Corleone, son of Michael, makes his operatic debut as the lead tenor, the hapless Turiddu who gets knifed by a jealous husband for his amorous escapades. Never mind that no untried tenor in real life gets a debut at the prestigious Massimo as anything more than a stage extra. Never mind also that, in order to interlock with the action of the offstage drama, Mascagni’s little opera has been chopped up and reassembled with opening and closing scenes reversed. ”We had to do it,” was Carmine Coppola’s simple explanation. “Otherwise it wouldn’t work.” The “Godfather” trilogy’s composer, arranger, conductor and cultural conscience-without-portfolio; father of Francis, who directed, and Talia, who played Michael’s sister; grandfather of Sofia, who played Michael’s daughter; brother of Anton, who conducted the operatic scenes: the elder Coppola himself serves as head-of-family to the whole filmed chronicle, and has from the start. Surging headlong into a pastrami-on-rye at a deli not far from his home “in the low-rent part of Woodland Hills,” Godfather Coppola seemed happy with his many roles.Record collectors past a certain age know, of course, yet another Coppola: Piero, a prodigal composer and conductor who flourished around 1930 and who himself came from a long line of singers and instrumentalists. “I got a letter from his widow once, asking if we were related, but I don’t know,” Coppola said. “The name is common all over Italy. I was in Milan once, and I saw a Banco Coppola so I went in and introduced myself. They still wouldn’t cash a check.”Carmine Coppola turned 80 last June. He, too, got to appear in “The Godfather, Part III”; you can see him leading the Italian folk band in the party scene. You can also see him as he was 40 years ago, in the videos of Arturo Toscanini telecasts with the NBC Symphony recently reissued by RCA. There he sits in the first flutist’s chair, playing his magic flute in, for example, Wagner’s “Forest Murmurs,” a diminutive fellow with hair slicked back. When RCA gets around to reissuing Toscanini’s audio recording of Act Two of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice,” you’ll hear Coppola in the long flute solo in the ballet music.”My father fell in love with the flute while he was in the Italian army,” Coppola reminisced. “He was stationed at Forli, near Rimini, and there was a small opera in the town. He went to “Lucia di Lammermoor,” and after the flute solo in the Mad Scene he resolved that if he had a son he’d make sure that the boy got flute lessons. He married, and moved to New York, and after I was born (June 11, 1910) he made good on his vow.”After graduating the Juilliard School, young Carmine got a job in Hartford. “Radio stations had their own orchestras in the 1930s, and I got a job at WTIC. From there I went to the orchestra at Radio City Music Hall. Of course I didn’t know then that I’d be back there some day, conducting my own music for the the silent movie of “Napoleon.” How’d you like the music for that? Pretty romantic, huh?”By the time Toscanini and NBC beckoned, Coppola had moved on to Detroit, where he played in the Detroit Symphony and was also on coast-to-coast radio as flutist in the weekly “Ford Sunday Evening Hour.” His second child, Francis, was born at Ford Hospital during the Detroit stint — just in case you’re wondering where his middle name comes from. Carmine Coppola remained with Toscanini for nine years. If you have the pirate recording of Toscanini rehearsing “La Traviata,” youll hear the conductor arguing with soprano Licia Albanaes. “Listen to Coppola,” the old man is screaming. “He play it right. You no sing it right.” ”I used to tell Toscanini that I wanted to conduct,” Coppola went on. “He’d argue with me: “Why you want conduct when you play flute so good?” “But you were a cellist,” I’d say, “Yes” he said, “but I wasn’t a good cellist.”Showbiz beckoned, and Coppola followed his conducting ambition as music director for David Merrick productions, easing his Italian conscience now and then by conducting operas at the Brooklyn Academy. “Horrible, one rehearsal, maybe even less. But fun.”I was conducting “Half a Sixpence” on Broadway when Francis called from Hollwyood. He’d been assigned to direct a musical — “Finian’s Rainbow,” it ended up a flop — and he needed me. Well, you know the rest.”Coppola worked on several major films, both as composer and arranger. “Victor Young asked me to rescore the aria from “Pagliacci” for Lauritz Melchior. Now Leoncavallo did a pretty good job of orchestrating that aria himself; no, Young had to have something bigger for the movies. That’s the way things sometimes worked”Then Francis saw a revival of the Douglas Fairbanks “Thief of Bagdad,” a silent film with a new score played by a live orchestra. He decided to try the same with the legendary Abel Gance “Napoleon,” with Carmine pulling together a score part-original part-pastiche, with legendary results. That, too, has been Carmine’s role in “The Godfather” films, pulling together the major themes created by the late Nino Rota, adding others of his own as needed, bringing in repertory pieces to fill out the atmosphere. “The Godfather III” is a veritable musical panorama, with a grand religious chorus by Carmine, a band version of the famous chorus from Verdi’s “Nabucco,” a beautiful setting for guitar of Rota’s archetypal “Godfather Theme,” and, of course, the climactic “Cavalleria Rusticana.”JON: SHOULD THE NEXT TWO GRAFS MAYBE GO IN A BOX? [F/L]Typical of the Coppolas’ respect for dramatic verities, they decided early on not to cast Anthony Corleone merely as a pretty Sicilian face with a dubbed-in tenor, but to find a real tenor who could also pass as a Corleone. Franc D’Ambrosio, the 28-year-old Long Islander, was chosen after an extensive talent search. “didn’t even know I could sing until my teens,” he stated in a recent telephone conversation. Trained at Hartford’s Hartt College and also at the Accademia Vocale at Lucca, D”Ambrosio had never done any more than classroom short scenes when he found himself tapped for the role — and for a reported
$350,000, which no tenor has ever pulled down for singing “Cavalleria Rusticana,” or anything else, in an opera house.”It was an unbelievable experience,” D’Ambrosio said. “I never saw myself as a “Cavalleria” tenor; I hear myself more as a light tenor for, say, “Barber of Seville.” But Beppe di Tomasi, who staged the opera scenes for the movie, was really impressed with me. He told people that he could help me technically, but that I had a sensitivity that nobody could touch.” Supertenor Luciano Pavarotti agreed. After hearing D’Ambrosio he invited the young singer to his home in Pesaro. “He was also most encouraging,” D’Ambrosio reported.JON: SHOULD THOSE LAST TWO GRAFS GO IN A BOX ? [F/L]Even in its mangled form, “Cavalleria” seems headed for the charts — not that it has ever been far away. It won’t do Franc D’Ambrosio any harm, either, although he says he’s now looking at movie scripts rather than opera contracts. Carmine Coppola chortled over the notion of a raw tenor making his debut in such a killer role. “Nice voice, gotta mature,” was his one-line review.”We didn’t change any of the music in the opera,” Coppola continued. “We just put some of it in different places.I told Francis I’d be willing to conduct the opera myself. After all, I’ve done it before, and it’s a pretty square score. But Francis thought it would be nice to bring Anton in on the project. “You’ve got enough to do,” he told me.”One thing I want you to understand,” said Carmine Coppola at the end of his sandwich and his interview. “Sure, there are a couple of Coppolas on these projects, but it’s not because we’re related. There’s absolutely no nepotism in any of Francis’ decisions. When we work together, it’s strictly as composer and director, never as father and son.”

Listening to new music is, to a large extent, a process of redefinition. The
composer presents you with an array of unfamiliar sounds, and asks you to
expand your personal musical vocabulary to embrace his innovative idwas. It
sometimes works.
LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), a lively downtown art gallery that
also includes a large performance space, is presenting three concerts on
successive Saturday nights in its “Sonic Series,” devoted to exploring new
musical sounds. Last Saturday’s opening concert, in a real sense, got off with
a bang, in a program by the percussionist Ron George and the sarod player Linda
Moskow.
George, as his many previous concerts have demonstrated, is not just any
percussion player. He builds his own instruments and he composes his own music.
For the first piece on Saturday’s program he sat in, you might say, the
driver’s seat of the “Bell Tree,” a fantastic composite one-man instrument of
his own design.
From a scaffolding of pipes and clamps, there were suspended 15 metal pieces
of various shapes: old drumheads, pot covers, Chinese gongs. Below these were a
further collection of metallic pieces: bowls, goblets, hanging cymbals and a
steel anvil. On both sides were several large gongs and a tam-tam, activated by
pedals. Down amidst all the paraphernalia, a paper scroll containing the music
unrolled at the touch of another pedal.
None of this would be more than clever hardware, of course, except that the 20-
minute piece he played on his instrument, “Variations on a Butterfly” turned
out to be music of considerable beauty, remarkable for its variety of sound and
mood.
Later George and several collaborators showed off yet another instrument of his
fashioning, an “American Gamelan” which did, indeed, produce sounds
reminiscent of its Indonesian counterpart. Instead of the various exotic drums,
however, George’s ensemble consists of clusters of various-sized tubes, metal
and bamboo, plus several more large gongs. His piece for the ensemble, called
“The Floating Bubble,” came off as 15 minutes of gorgeous, complex clatter,
considerably denser than the typical Indonesian repertory, bursting with
energy.
Linda Moskow’s sarod — a handsome, traditional 25-string instrument both
stroked and plucked, smaller than the familiar sitar but clearly related —
also made some marvelous sounds. Her part of the program included both
traditional Indian classical works and, just a shade less successfully, some of
her own songs that created a somewhat uneasy mix of east and west. The twain
don’t always meet, you know.

An old friend has been in town these last few days, and has made himself
welcome. Bernard Rands, former professor of composition at U.C.-San Diego,
Pulitzer winner (for his “Canti di Sole”), currently Boston based, brought a
glowing new orchestral work to this weekend’s Los Angeles Philharmonic
concert. The Thursday night audience, which isn’t easily charmed by new music,
seemed genuinely charmed on this occasion.
Rands’ work, which lasts about 20 minutes, takes its title from a Samuel
Beckett poem, “…body and shadow…” punctuation and non-capitalization
as given [F/L]. The first of its two movements is framed by a fearsome outburst
from the solo timpani at beginning and end. In between comes a delicious
orchestral workout, mostly on the furious side but coming to rest now and then
in the sunlight of simple, clear harmonies. There is no direct derivation, says
Rands, from the Beckett text; the two works, even so, share an air of poetic
inscrutability.
The second movement is even better, a haunting, sinuous melody, ever so lightly
tinged by suggestions of Oriental harmonies, emerges slowly. Clouded over by
interfering percussion instruments at the start, it eventually shakes itself
free and seems to glisten in pure light. The music ends softly, but David Alan
Miller’s conducting of the piece carried enough conviction that the audience
knew to observe a few seconds of respectful silence at the end. This is sure,
expressive music by a master of the craft. It was good to greet Rands and his
art once again.
Nothing else on the program quite reached that height, however. Rachmaninoff’s
“Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” is so loaded with bright musical tricks
that you’d think it impossible to play it badly. It fell to the evening’s
soloist, Alexander Toradze, to achieve that dubious honor. Toradze’s big
fingers dashed around on the keyboard with a certain flashiness, but the
playing was merely cute and brittle; there’s more to the music than that.
At the end Miller and the orchestra roamed through Mendelssohn’s “Scotch”
symphony, gracefully but without notable event. For all its beauty, its
glorious wind scoring in particular, this is music with problems. It totters on
the brink of pomposity and, in the slow movement and the final peroration,
falls in. There was nothing wrong with Miller’s performance, both spirited and
respectful, but ot made for a very long 45 minutes even so.

Outside, the world showed signs of coming apart; inside — in UCLA’s Royce Hall
on Wednesday night, to be specific — all was well. Itzhak Perlman is more than
just our best player of the violin; he is also a musician. Violin recitals do
not always count as serious musical events; at least half of Perlman’s
did.
That half, consisting of sonatas by Mozart (the A-major, K. 526) and Prokofiev
(the F minor, Opus 80), drew much of its appeal from Perlman’s superior sense
of the ethereal elegance of a Mozart phrase, his phenomenal ability to turn the
slow movement of the Prokofiev into a gossamer thread of sound right at the
edge of silence. In both these works he drew immeasurable support, furthermore,
from the collaboration at the piano of Janet Guggenheim, the Bay Area musician
who has performed and recorded with him many times.
An eloquent and imaginative musician on her own, Guggenheim provided at least
as much of the shaping force in the Mozart, a marvelous, subtle work full of
dark, lyrical mysteries, as did Perlman. The Prokofiev, similarly — a work
both wry and introverted — similarly benefited from a continuous sense of
give-and-take. It is consistently to Perlman’s credit, in fact, that he knows
how to differentiate between the purely showoff aspects of, say, the music on
the second half of this program and music of greater intellectual substance
that demands a true collaborative approach. Not all violinists are that
considerate.
The second half — that string of desiccated marshmallows that Edvard Grieg put
forward as his C-minor Violin Sonata, and another string of separate tidbits by
Kreisler, Poulenc, Albeniz and Tchaikovsky — did, of course, serve some kind
of purpose, as the cheers of the near-capacity crowd demonstrated. The
repertory may be mindless, but it can achieve a kind of glory when fiddled with
as Itzhak Perlman surely can. Master fiddler, master musician and, in some
antic stage routines during the encore pieces, a not-bad comedian, Perlman
ranks as best-of-breed.