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Competition warm-up

IVCI Laureate Series
Indiana History Center
Sunday, June 11

The Indiana History Center’s Basile Theater was pretty well-filled for the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis’ final chamber concert prior to the competition itself — the Seventh Quadrennial — to run this Sept. 1-17. As such, we can view it as a warm-up to the much-heralded event.

The IVCI’s concertmaster program always ends their chamber-music season, and last Sunday’s was no exception. Guest violinist Martin Chalifour, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s concertmaster, joined guest pianist Bernadene Blaha in a program which forecasts the upcoming IVCI Preliminaries and Semifinals, to be held in this venue.

Both musicians are Canadians. Though Chalifour was not an IVCI laureate, his list of credentials is impressive. Regrettably, in this concert, his playing neither lived up to them nor was the equal of a sizeable number of our own laureates. And while Blaha seemed to warm up through the concert, her pianism in the two pre-intermission pieces seemed on the matter-of-fact side.

Opening with Paul Hindemith’s two-part Sonata in E-flat, Op. 11 No. 1 (1918), Chalifour’s tone varied from white to excessive vibrato, producing an insipid, inconsistent quality to his playing — including some questionable intonation. Blaha strolled through her open intervals in the opening part and her imitative counterpoint in the second with a mechanical purposefulness, something admittedly difficult to avoid with the German composer’s Modernist reversion to academic neo-Classicism, especially in his early works.

Next came the afternoon's warhorse, Beethoven's "Kreutzer" Sonata: No. 9 in A, Op. 47. A favorite work often recorded (but omitted from the competition's chamber rounds because of its length), its ease of comparison with other violin-piano duos places all-the-greater burden on any performers. Our present ones not only failed to generate the excitement expected in the outer movements but the beauty implicit in the F-major variations movement as well. The tempos weren't the cause; they were forthright and on target. Rather, the performers' lack of inflection, of musical involvement, produced more than a hint of the pedestrian: the playing of notes instead of the re-creation of great music.

With the second half, all works American Modern, we had fewer performance-comparison options, diverting the listening more to discovery and less to critiquing. Chalifour began with excerpts from Four Songs of Solitude for solo violin by John Harbison (b. 1938). Brief and connected, these proclaim a single “endless” melody with only brief instances of double stopping (two strings bowed at once).

This was followed by four Bagatelles for violin and piano by Stephen Paulus (b. 1948) — an ambitious work revealing Blaha’s best piano inflections of the afternoon. Two short pieces each by Aaron Copland and George Gershwin concluded the program. Jascha Heifetz arranged the Porgy and Bess songs, “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” Chalifour’s playing scarcely took the place of good vocalizing.These performers’ failure at excellence has only dramatized the superlative, five-star collaborations of violinist David Kim and pianist Gail Niwa at last June’s IVCI concertmaster program and of violinist Andrés Cárdenes with our own Zeyda Ruga Suzuki in June 2002. Let’s look forward, all the more, to this September’s competition.