Pierre Boulez Saal
Brahms:
Violin Sonata no.2 in A
major, op.100
Enescu:
Violin Sonata no.2 in F
minor, op.6
Webern:
Four Pieces for violin and
piano, op.7
Franck:
Violin Sonata in A major,
FWV 8
Christian Teztlaff (violin)
Alexander Lonquich (piano)
What could be more satisfying
than a comprehending performance of a Brahms masterwork? Nothing—and this was
certainly that. Intimate yet not withdrawn, the opening of the first movement
to the A major Violin Sonata—and much else besides—always had much bubbling
beneath the surface, sometimes bubbling over, even erupting. Shifting balance
between violin (Christian Tetzlaff) and piano (Alexander Lonquich) were managed
almost as if this were the work of one player rather than two: a true
partnership. Apparently simplicity soon revealed complexity, balance between
melody and harmony, horizontal and vertical finely judged, likewise ever
shifting. Formal concision and expression were two sides of the same coin. An ‘Andante
tranquillo’ whose lyricism again encompassed harmony as much as melody proved
the perfect foil for a Vivace section
whose shadow games spoke not only of playful melancholy but also the melancholy
of play. This second movement’s through-composition was truly felt and
expressed, no mere structural ‘feature’. Metrical dislocation in the finale, as
elsewhere, told without the slightest exaggeration. Once again, line, tempo,
and mood were perfectly judged for music as intense, in its own way, as
anything in Schoenberg and as deeply indebted to Beethoven, as revealed here, as
anything Brahms wrote. Such things need not be shouted from the rooftops,
especially with Brahms.
George Enescu’s 1899 Second—again
of three—Violin Sonata was next on the programme, in a similarly absorbing performance.
Its first movement, ‘Assez mouvementé’, began to speak from another shadow world
with similar command of line, both aspects related to what we had heard in
Brahms yet also distinct. Lonquich wore formidable technical demands lightly
and without sentimentality, with an elegance one might consider Gallic. Such
demands revealed rather than concealed underlying harmonic rhythm. Tetzlaff
likewise made light of what he was asked to do, simplicity of utterance, not contrivance,
the order of the day. The lyrical trade of the second movement offered
something similarly distinctive. ‘Brahms with a French accent’ would sell it quite
short, yet as a starting point in this particular recital, it may yet have
served a purpose. Here, as elsewhere, contours were expertly, meaningfully
shaped. The finale proved as rigorous as it was passionate, the idiom of Enescu’s
strange ‘Romanticism’—I think one may just about call it that—judged to a tee.
Equally fine in judgement was Teztlaff’s witty sign-off, too consequential
merely to be nonchalant, yet momentarily, partially suggestive of that.
If I have heard a superior
concert-hall Webern Four Pieces then I must have forgotten—which seems
unlikely. Without apparent effort, art concealing art, Teztlaff imparted such
meaning to his opening perfect fourth (double-stopped), that by the time
Lonquich’s piano chord responded, one might almost have reached the end of a
conventional first thematic group. The nine bars of the first piece present an
entire drama of their own and were presented as such. Webern’s second piece
emerged as a scherzo on acid, each note again the equivalent to a hundred in so
much other music. The third announced itself as a drama of pitch and proceeded
to be a drama of much else too, almost a Mahlerian world in itself. As in
Beethoven, as in Brahms, a Webern finale’s victory needs to be won—and how it
was here. All composer and performers asked was that we listen; it is difficult
to imagine why, in circumstances so propitious, anyone would have declined.
For the final work on the
programme we returned to A major, to César Franck’s Violin Sonata. What struck
me most clearly from this sympathetic, refined, often ardent performance was, without
disregard to certain affinities, the very different nature of Franck’s formal concerns
here. The danger—I am not sure any performance can entirely avoid it—is that
the music begins to speak with a certain sameness. Whatever the truth of my
suspicion, Teztlaff and Lonquich made a valiant attempt, not through overt
effort to be ‘different’, but by attending to different character between
movements, by greater yet far from unrelieved intensification in the second and
third, and finally by presenting a finale that balanced developmental and
cyclical demands. It certainly did not stand still. Nor did the subtle,
well-nigh Goethian tragedy—major mode conclusion notwithstanding—of the encore,
the final movement from Brahms’s G major Violin Sonata. My only regret was that
we had not heard the entire work; next time, perhaps.