David Stabler wrote a review [not posted on the Oregonian’s website at the time of posting] of this Saturday’s classical series concert featuring the Latvian violinist Baiba Skride as soloist in the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto along with Sibelius’ Scene with Cranes and the Walton First Symphony.
He was not enamored of Skride’s approach to the Tchaikovsky:
She didn’t employ an unusual range of colors nor did she phrase freely enough to suggest spontaneity. Her playing wasn’t unfeeling, but it didn’t burn with intensity, either.
I couldn’t disagree more!
I fully admit that it is quite unusual for the Tchaikovsky to be played as music rather than being used as a star vehicle to be ridden hard and put away wet, its meaning wrung out of it by wild and self-indulgent gestures, becoming a parody of itself. I remember a favorite soloist of our previous music director who trampled the poor Tchaikovsky so thoroughly and completely that it ceased to be a violin concerto and became something akin to an uncensored view into MTV’s The Real World video confessional booth – phrases were vomited forth with no regard for continuity, only for emotional affect or audience pandering, and left me feeling cheap and used as a result.
My wife Heather wonders if we’re so numb as a society to performances as over-the-top spectacles that we’re left flat when presented with a nuanced performance – and since when did simplicity become a dirty word?
As for lack of spontanaeity, Skride did many things differently than in our rehearsals with her, and there was an atmosphere of chamber music making on stage for the entirety of the concerto – perhaps it didn’t make it into the deadened reaches of our concert hall’s flaccid acoustics – but there was spontanaeity aplenty.
Also, the second movement calls for the soloist to play the A-section with a mute, but most soloists trained by Galamian or DeLay have ignored those instructions (as well as making many cuts in the first and last movements). Skride chose to play the entire movement muted, which is somewhat unusual – I’ll have to ask her about how she came to that decision. She did use two different mutes between Saturday and Sunday night – we’ll see what she does tonight.