Since the Green Music Center opened in 2012, Sonoma County has been awash in great violinists. In two short years, the GMC has already hosted Hilary Hahn, Anne Sophie Mutter, Itzhak Perlman, Vadim Repin and Gil Shaham, among other luminaries. On Friday, Joshua Bell joined the list — except he didn't play at the GMC.
Thanks to a colossal scheduling mix-up, Bell and his accompanist Alessio Bax ended up at the Wells Fargo Center, the old home of the Santa Rosa Symphony, which presented Bell's recital as a benefit concert. Thus Bell and his 1713 Stradivarius were relegated to the acoustically defective Wells Fargo stage while the GMC stood empty. In the first half, Bell didn’t much help his own cause. He projected a thin, somewhat superficial tone, bypassing repeated opportunities to dig in and draw more from his Strad. He was more like an ice skater than a pearl diver. Fortunately, that all changed after intermission, when Bell finally broke through and delivered a masterful performance.
The repertoire may have figured into Bell’s transformation. He opened with Schubert’s “Duo” sonata, a lovely piece written when the composer was 20. One would expect Bell to bring new insight and feeling into Schubert’s familiar melodies, but his tempos were middling and his dynamic range was limited, settling mostly into mezzo piano. His technique was of course flawless, and his bowing was superb, but Schubert seemed far away. There was no arch to his performance: the end was the same as the beginning.
The subsequent Grieg sonata in F major — his first, written when he was 22 — was equally dispassionate, although Bell did begin to warm up on his lower strings and to exhibit some body movement other than gentle swaying.
Grieg’s fellow composer Gerhard Schjelderup famously remarked that the first sonata is “the work of a youth who has seen only the sunny side of life.” Bell projected that sunny element, zipping through all manner of treacherous string crossings and flashy runs without breaking a sweat. The sonata, however, never goes much beyond sunny. The main impression is of a series of incompletely developed musical ideas connected by a string of false cadences. As with the Schubert, there was no arch, no forward motion pulling the listener along.
Feeling discouraged, I changed my seat at intermission in the hopes of escaping the HVAC and getting better sound. The new location was much improved, well suited to the new Bell who strolled onstage with Bax after the break and began talking to the audience for the first time. His goal was to introduce the F Minor Prokofiev, one of the great violin sonatas, right up there with Beethoven’s Kreutzer. “In a word,” observed Bell, “this sonata is Death.”
In his brief remarks, Bell condensed the theme of each movement to a single word or phrase, with the first being the Machine; the second, Hell; the third, Heaven; and the last a synthesis, culminating in pianissimo “wind over the grave” violin scales.
This narrative unveiled the arch that Bell had previously lacked. From the opening notes, he and Bax offered palpable drama marked by strong rhythms, an immense dynamic range and razor-sharp intonation. Bell’s double stops in the opening movement were particularly notable, but so were his pizzicato and his relentless runs up and down the fingerboard. It was an authoritative performance, imbued with mystery and insight.
The two musicians chose a deliberate tempo in the second movement, “Hell,” which features a repeated series of down bows on the lower strings — a riveting trope that commands attention. Bell tried to squeeze every last bit of sound out of his Strad, projecting an aura of barely contained fury. That intensity heightened the contrast to the quiescent “Heaven” movement, which emerged out of Bell’s violin like a floating cloud of sound. He leaned far forward as if to shape the cloud, his instrumental voice never rising above a whisper.
The finale began as a furious rush, recapitulating previous themes and introducing new ones. The “wind over the grave” was much in evidence, as was a series of beguiling chords. The most gripping passage, however, was the last: long notes formed into a transcendent phrase.
The Prokofiev sonata was more than enough, but Bell offered two encores: the Rachmaninov Vocalise and Sarasate’s Introduction and Tarantella, an over-the-top showpiece that was simply astounding.
Now that Bell has shown what he can do in dire circumstances, one can only hope that he will return to Sonoma County as soon as possible, this time in a better venue.