Shaham is miraculous

Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra music director Mario Venzago’s desire to program his first full season with a bit of “rough” music lying within his personal “vision” hit pay dirt last weekend with an outstanding presentation of two wholly disparate works — and a soloist to die for. American-turned-Israeli violinist Gil Shaham, now residing in New York, returned to the Hilbert Circle Theatre last weekend after captivating our locals with a superlative Brahms Violin Concerto two seasons ago. Shaham at least equaled his achievement this time with Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D, Op. 61. That was after intermission.

Before, Venzago offered the complete ballet music from Béla Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin, Op. 19 (1919). Though the Hungarian Modernist’s early, ambitiously orchestrated setting — in a “big, chaotic metropolis” — of scoundrels acting as pimps who force a girl into hooking has been performed several times in ISO history, none could have been as successful as this one. This is blatantly descriptive music and is greatly aided by the audience’s knowing what is being “described.”

Venzago had a screen mounted above the orchestra onto which successive titles were projected summarizing the ongoing action. In this most colorful of his orchestral scores, Bartók uses a clarinet to depict the girl, and ISO principal David Bellman beautifully portrayed her varying emotions as she encounters one then another “John” — both rejected by the scoundrels for having no money. Then the mandarin appears; the scoundrels dislike him (strongly); they hang him; he lives until she successfully seduces him (admittedly hard to visualize); he then dies peacefully.

But Venzago finds this ending somehow incomplete. So he appends J.S. Bach’s final chorale, “Before Your Throne I Now Appear,” to Mandarin, using a Bartók-style orchestration by Jean-François Taillard, a composer and former Venzago colleague. This skillful concatenation of music, words and composers imparted images, colors and “meaning” from an excellently honed account throughout.
I’ve never found the Beethoven Violin Concerto’s first movement entirely satisfying: It’s long, it’s repetitive, it’s surfacy — and, in an ordinary presentation, a bit banal. However, the Venzago-Shaham collaboration made a believer of me in a performance filled with punch and verve throughout. Not to mention Shaham’s peerless tone. No matter how softly he plays, his notes envelope the hall, for which the conductor’s dynamic ensemble control gets his share of credit. I cannot recall hearing a more beautifully played Op. 61 than last Friday’s — nor another violinist who has mesmerized me since Hilary Hahn’s ISO appearance early this season.