Naturally Exceptional

One of the downsides of living and listening in a place so attractive to visiting artists as the Bay Area is that even the best musicians who actually live here have a hard time attracting notice among the touring stars. It takes attention to lower-profile recital series, faculty recitals, and the like even to realize how good we have it. The Crowden School's "Sundays @ Four" series, at the Crowden Music Center in Berkeley, is one of our invaluable lines on the quality of the Bay Area's year-round musical community. Sunday's recital featured violinist Axel Strauss, on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory, and pianist Miles Graber, also of the Conservatory staff. Those of us who have heard Strauss before had some idea what to expect, which is playing that's well beyond the ordinary in its grace, power, and sheen. We got it. Only a handful of Baroque violin sonatas not by Bach or Handel ever gained much of a foothold in the "modern" violin repertoire, but Jean-Marie Leclair's Op. 9/3 appears to be one of them (it was recorded by Menuhin, Oistrakh, Szeryng, and the young Itzhak Perlman, among others). It's not difficult to hear why. The piece is gracious, elegant, full of opportunities to sing and also to sizzle. And it's capped with a mischievous and finger-twisting Tambourin movement that would make a wicked, dancy encore on its own. "Modern" violinists who program Baroque music (outside the few secure repertoire standards) have, by and large, had difficulty settling on how to approach it, now that this is generally taken for granted as historical-performance territory. Of the two common approaches, I confess I have more sympathy with the brazen "this is my music, too, and I'll play it the way I like it" way, a tack that proclaims not so much that "historical performance" never existed as that it shouldn't have. The usual alternative is a sort of queasy accommodation with historical performance's surface attributes (little vibrato, tapered long notes, sometimes inégalité) that invariably sounds pale and contrived — all the strictures of "period style," with none of the fun.

Elegance With Dash

Axel Strauss, happily, fit into neither camp. He did, it is true, pare down his already narrow vibrato almost to the vanishing point in places, but the spare sound seemed natural rather than imposed, and he didn't hesitate to use his considerable full power when circumstances seemed to require it. "Natural," indeed, is the apt word for the entire performance, which was so disarmingly graceful and unself-conscious as to put the how-should-we-play-this-stuff-anyway? question neatly to bed. And the elegance didn't preclude dash, either. Strauss danced lithely through the second-movement Allegro, with its "hunting" music; and that Tambourin finale was terrific, virtuoso showmanship of the best kind.

Leclair's is the annoying (from the player's standpoint, at least) sort of virtuosity that often is even harder to play than it sounds. That movement contains one lick — repeated several times and in more than one key — that is an absolute left-hand nightmare, a sort of wickedly ingenious torture device aimed mercilessly at the little finger. Strauss tossed it off over and over again with no perceptible strain, but I suspect that the violinists in the audience were feeling their own left hands cramping in sympathy, just watching him. Mine did. Graber, for his part, handled the somewhat spare continuo realization uncommonly well. This kind of part can sit ill on the piano, yet Graber's lightness of touch and care with the voicing of the right hand made the choice of accompanying instrument almost a nonissue.

From Leclair to Fauré might seem a wide leap, though actually Strauss' way with the latter's A-major Sonata, Op. 13, was not so far from his way with the former. The singing line of his Fauré was the line of his Leclair, only made more open, more generous, to match the more spacious span of the music. I could have wished for a little more bend in that line, a little more willingness to linger over details. In the first movement especially, the music's soaring trajectory achieved its great directness at the expense of some smoothing-over of small-scale events. But what a fine thing that directness was in its own right. Strauss' ease and power of legato remains a marvel to me. The sound is strikingly strong and clear but also seemingly effortless; it is playing as much a pleasure to watch as to hear. I was not entirely convinced by the Scherzo, in which the accented notes at the ends of the tune's microphrases seemed to slow Strauss up fractionally. And there were places in which Graber's full-blooded playing of the piano part threatened the musical (if not the acoustical) balance. All in all, however, it was a splendid performance, free and long-limbed and essentially joyous.

Stylish Encore Work

The second of the two Smetana violin/piano pieces titled From My Homeland concluded the official program — though, coming after the two substantial sonatas as it did, the short, showy work felt more like a first encore. Strauss had terrific fun with it, blustering magnificently in the stormy opening and then whizzing through the Czech dance music following it with great flair. Then came the encores proper. I wondered whether Kreisler's Liebesfreud, with its double-stopped thirds and sharply turned dotted rhythms, was meant to mirror the first movement of the Leclair at the other end of the recital. Strauss played it stylishly, not stiffly, but without the now-usual extra dollops of "Viennese manner." The other encore was a Mendelssohn Song Without Words (Op. 67/2, I think), one of a sampling arranged for violin and piano by Friedrich Hermann and recently recorded by Strauss, with pianist Cord Garben, for the Naxos label. The arrangement, with the piano confined to the accompanimental texture and the violin taking the singing line, was effective and (of course) seemingly tailor-made for Strauss. A stack of the Naxos CDs was on sale at the front door. After this live sample (so to speak) of the contents, I'd hazard a guess that few were left by the end of the afternoon.