February 23, 2008
'Duo,' in premiere, proves worthy work
Boca Raton’s Unitarian Universalist Fellowship was the venue last Saturday for a world premiere of a work for violin and piano by Arthur Weisberg.
Weisberg’s music, discussed here recently in connection with a disc of his woodwind pieces, impresses with its precision, its contrapuntal orientation and its feeling for traditional contrasting themes, so unusual for the mainstream of contemporary classical music over the past 50 years or so (though maybe less today).
Violinist Saul Bitran, first violinist of Mexico’s Cuarteto Latinoamericano, and pianist Heather Coltman — both of them also recently featured on a disc of American piano quintets — gave the premiere of Weisberg’s Duo for Violin and Piano on a program that also offered sonatas by Beethoven and Brahms, as well as pieces by Chopin and Korngold.
Weisberg’s two-movement work, begun in 2003 but only finished within the past few months, has a kind of dark power I haven’t encountered in his other pieces. The first movement opens with a strong, expressive, rising theme that begins at the bottom of the violin and soars into a broader lyric line. The mood is passionate and brooding, with anguished chordal outbursts from the piano alternating with the longer lines of the violin.
Bitran played with great intensity and force, which could be heard especially during the mini-cadenza of the first movement. Coltman is a player of considerable strength and formidable technique, and she brought to the piece a thorough sense of command. Weisberg has written his Duo as a partnership of equals in which both instruments have plenty to say and no hesitation about saying it.
The second and final movement played off the contrast between an aggressive, skittering theme punctuated by three descending notes in the piano, and a softer secondary theme made up of longer, slower notes in pairs. Violin and piano trade off variants of this material, including a passage toward the end in which Weisberg’s fondness for independent lines was clear: the violin floated back and forth with the lower notes as the piano offered climbing notes in the bass.
The piece ends with a last-minute scurry in the violin followed by a hammer blow chord from both instruments. Weisberg’s Duo is a taut, tense, powerful piece of work, and would make an attractive contemporary American selection on violin recital programs.
The rest of the recital Saturday night was very enjoyable, and was a good vehicle for two highly accomplished musicians to show their range. I enjoyed most the four pieces from Korngold’s music for Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, and the late D minor Sonata of Brahms.
The Korngold, despite its slightly schmaltzy flavor, is the work of an inventive, skillful composer who knows how to entertain and enchant an audience, and Bitran and Coltman were effective emissaries for his style.
Both players also were fully dedicated to the Brahms sonata (Op. 108) that closed the program; highlights were the beautiful second movement, which received full-throated Romantic treatment, and the nervous precision of the curious little third-movement scherzo. There was also much to admire about the two outer movements, which show Brahms in the full flower of his late Romantic muse.
