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Sober Bartok With A Swirling FinaleBig ideas in music gravitate toward big sounds. Well used, a single instrument does even better. Viviane Hagner’s violin recital with the pianist Tatiana Goncharova at the 92nd Street Y on Thursday was mostly Brahms but mainly about Bartok’s Sonata for Solo Violin. It is a singular piece in more ways than one. Bartok wrote its four movements in waning health, in the United States, alongside the Concerto for Orchestra, his great ode to symphonic luxury. It is nice to fantasize a composer at work going back and forth between the two, seeking relief from the opulence of one in the pared-down sounds of the other, and vice versa. Bartok died the next year, in 1945. The sonata’s opening is a grand statement: public declamation filled with color and exclamation points. The fugue that follows is more sober. Then comes the “Melodia”; if a lovelier, more touching piece of linear writing exists in 20th-century music, I don’t know it. At the end is one of Bartok’s swirling finales, like fog traveling at hurricane speeds. Brahms was good at destroying music he did not want remembered, but the C minor Scherzo at the start of this impressive evening might have escaped by hiding itself inside a hybrid sonata. Two of the movements were contributed by Schumann; the other was by Albert Dietrich. Brahms’s pounding emphasis and military bearing are a dead giveaway. The other Brahms consisted of the Opus 39 Waltzes and some of the Hungarian Dances, all in arrangements for violin and piano from the two-piano originals. Here Brahms is in the best of moods. The waltzes, flowing from one to the next, are a precise and literal homage to Schubert’s magical eight-bar phrases written some 40 years before. The Hungarian Dances were reworked by Joachim, who changed some notes to fit the violin. The news on Ms. Hagner is all good. Her companion piece for the Bartok was Bach’s D minor Chaconne, also for solo violin, beautifully organized and with an expressivity and naturalness that took your mind off the calm control working behind the scenes. Her sound is unusually big and filled with color and was well set off by Ms. Goncharova’s fine playing. Germany seems to be the new source of young violinists. The large audience loved this one. Tag CloudExternal InformationAdditional InformationClassical Music: Rattle’s Mahler, Vivaldi Vocals and a Tippett Revelation...Dear Virtuoso, I Wrote This One Just for You... Music Review | Genesis : Playing a Couple of Old Chapters and Familiar Verses... At City Opera, an Innovator Bows Out... Where Am I?News Main Page - Business - Sober Bartok With A Swirling Finale |
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