No Fiddling Around

Tastes in violin recitals have changed markedly over the years. At one time, the second half of a virtuoso's program generally consisted entirely of what we now think of as encore pieces. Nowadays, paradoxically, the only time you are likely to see a program like that is when the player is an "intellectual" musician making a historical point. The modern fashion leans more toward weighty, serious programs, often made up entirely of familiar sonatas, or at least of acknowledged masterpieces. Even by modern standards, though, Nikolaj Znaider's San Francisco Performances debut recital at Herbst Theatre Wednesday evening was on the severe side. Beethoven sonatas opened and closed; in between was Bach's monumental D-Minor Partita (the one with the great Chaconne) and, perhaps by way of light relief, a little Schoenberg. Given such a presentation, it comes as something of a relief to find that Znaider doesn't turn his nose up at virtuoso fluff (you can listen to his 2003 encore album Bravo! online). But to Wednesday's more highbrow fare, Znaider brought an intensity and a ferocious technique that made for a gripping, if uneven, recital.

Znaider has a striking violinistic presence. The most noticeable thing about his playing is the concentration and parsimoniousness of the bowing. His tone is dense, hard-edged; there's no fuzz, and precious little air, in the sound. Except that, unlike some other players of similar efficiency (Hilary Hahn comes to mind), Znaider has a variety of charming ways to inflect off-the-string bowstrokes, and he uses them often. When his bow is on the string it's positively glued there, but it can, and does, lift off and dance. It was the spirited bowing that carried the recital's opening work, Beethoven's E-flat-Major Sonata Op. 12/3. Znaider tossed off the passagework in the outer movements with zest and sass, displaying, incidentally, a left hand as nimble and focused as his right. I only wish his pianist had equaled him. Robert Kulek got around his part well enough, but in a piece where the piano decidedly occupies the leading role, his fingerwork wasn't even or clear enough to match Znaider's. Where the two instruments trade dueling cascades of sextuplets, in the first movement, it was no contest.

Making the Most of Second Fiddle

The central Adagio con molt'espressione, by contrast, found Kulek in possession of a fine singing line. Here Znaider's intense, minutely sustained legato playing was a marvel. The slow movements in the Beethoven sonatas often leave violinists at a loss, well aware that theirs is only an accompanying line but unable to figure out how to conduct themselves in it while nonetheless standing center stage. Znaider's solution, it seemed to me, was to make the effort involved in sustaining his subsidiary line a part of the point. You were made conscious of the energy and concentration required to hold those lines so long and to taper them so finely. As violin playing it was riveting, and yet it never got in the way of the piano or upstaged it. In comparison, the program's other Beethoven sonata, the G-Major Op. 96, was a disappointment. In the main, the trouble boiled down to tempo. Both outer movements were too leisurely — the first moving beat-by-beat rather than bar-by-bar, the theme of the last sedate and legato. The piece is, by Beethovenian standards, unusually loose and dreamy. Znaider and Kulek let that character color everything from the outset, which was perhaps unwise. Without much in the way of rhythmic backbone — and without much, either, of the zing I'd been given to expect from Znaider's bow — dreaminess came uncomfortably close to dreariness. Meanwhile, in the more aggressive parts of the score (there are some, mainly in the Scherzo and the finale), the duo favored hardened tone and bluster. There were fine individual moments, but as a whole the performance alternately sprawled and snarled too much for my taste. In between the Beethoven bookends came two mammoth challenges. Bach's D-Minor solo Partita was enormously impressive, if chilly. Znaider's control was, as ever, fierce. In the Allemande, the sound gave the impression of being squeezed out of the instrument under tremendous pressure, and yet the legato was flawless, the sound never broken or cracked. The Gigue was phenomenally clean and nimble, the kind of performance that makes others you've heard sound retrospectively sloppy by comparison. All the same, I found it a trifle dispiriting. Znaider's was "old-fashioned" Bach playing in the sense that meticulous evenness of tone production was one of its keynotes, but "Romanticized" it was not. It was cold, patrician, remote: Bach without the old-style virtuoso's rhetorical tricks, and without the historical-performance-influenced player's sense of dance and gesture either. For me, it was the worst of both worlds — except that, of course, as violin playing it was fabulous, and endlessly fascinating.

Who’s Afraid of Arnold Schoenberg?

The program's real standout, though, was Arnold Schoenberg's late Phantasy for violin with piano accompaniment, Op. 47. The work is almost never played, even by the relatively few violinists capable of bringing it off; the risks are just too great. And I don't mean just the risk of putting Schoenberg's name on a program, either, though heaven knows that's real enough. (As a young man with a violin case departed the audience after the Bach, at intermission, I heard him tell his aisle-mates, half-mockingly, "Enjoy the Schoenberg!") The problem with the piece isn't so much the abstract technical difficulties (though they are extreme); it's that the difficulties are such that the smallest flub spells total ruin. In ordinarily virtuosic music, a slight inaccuracy of tuning or attack represents an audible flaw, to be sure, but the gist of the music will come through anyway. But the Phantasy, like most of Schoenberg's late string writing, is full of places where tiny inaccuracies make for very large splats. Schoenberg supposedly protested that his music was not difficult to understand, "only badly played." It takes a certain audacity to make that argument about music so designed that the only alternative to literal perfection in performance is excruciating ugliness. Take one of Schoenberg's perverse favorites: double-stops with one note stopped in the ordinary way and the other a (natural or artificial) harmonic. These are incredibly difficult to make speak — if the two notes were bowed one after the other, rather than together, you'd use quite different modes of attack for each, and hitting them at once involves a fidgety compromise. But if you muff it, even marginally, all you get is a pitchless squeak. Then there are the double-stops that have to be hit hard and exactly out of thin air — not forgiving, some-wiggle-room-available things like thirds and sixths, but touchy things (like fourths) and contortion-inducing ones (like tenths). These and a host of similarly exacting feats, one after the other without respite, make up the whole of the piece's eight minutes or so of length. And the violinist has not only to vault accurately through them all without a trace of squeamishness or fear — timidity in this stuff sounds almost worse than inaccuracy — but to make an intelligible trajectory out of the lot. Is it any wonder that so few try? The wonder of it, though, is that if you posit the ideal, fearlessly accurate performer, the piece is rich, uncommonly involving music. In Znaider's hands it sang, glittered, soared, danced (this is late, Hollywood-period Schoenberg, but never had he sounded so Viennese). And Kulek was alert and nimble in the piano part — a true "accompaniment," this, written after the violin line and complementary to it. I came away with a new respect for Schoenberg's ear. He can't have heard many performances like this of his own music, but he must at least have imagined them. (Apparently the Schoenberg Violin Concerto is also in Znaider's repertoire. That I'd like to hear.) Znaider's encores were two of the Brahms Hungarian Dances: No. 17, dark and blustery, and No. 7, sly and positively kittenish in rhythm. The man can cut loose after all.