The Art of the Violin
The Midori Violin
Studio Project
On the evening of 17 March at the Lionel Wendt Theatre, under
the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of Colombo and before an invited
audience of its patrons, the great Midori and some of her protégés gave an
exhibition of classical violin music of a quality and virtuosity never before
heard in this country, and unlikely, in my opinion, ever to be heard again. I
was privileged to be a member of that audience, and I found the performance
breathtaking. I also got to hear some pieces of music I had never expected to see
played live, simply because no-one in our part of the world is physically
capable of playing them.
That Midori Goto
(who is known professionally only by her first name) should have chosen to
perform in Sri Lanka at all seems implausible at first blush. This is a woman who
stands in the front rank of classical violinists; her performances and
recordings are normally supported by the world’s most celebrated orchestras,
and she is one of the few performers ever to have recorded a version of
Saint-Saëns’s formidable First Violin Concerto. At the time of writing she
holds the Jascha Heifetz Chair at the University of Southern California’s Thornton
Music School and an honorary professorship at the Beijing Conservatory, as well
as guest professorships at Shanghai and in her native city of Osaka, Japan. For
some time, she was also a humanitas
professor at Oxford. Classic FM
magazine has named her one of the world’s top twenty-five violinists.
How did humble
Sri Lanka manage to attract a musician so grand? Part of the answer, as I heard
from CMSC concertmaster Lakshman Joseph de Saram, is that he and Midori were
once students together at Juilliard Pre-College in New York. Midori also
collaborated for some time with an accomplished pianist of Sri Lankan origin,
Rohan de Silva, and he, assisted by another highly regarded Sri Lanka-born
American pianist, Sujeeva Hapugalle, helped arrange her visit. But of course, personal
acquaintance is not nearly enough, of itself, to alter the schedule of one of
the world’s top concert violinists; the lady had her own reasons.
Midori, as I
have recently learnt, is the founder and chief executive of a USC-backed charity
or ‘community engagement project’ aimed at bringing great Western classical
music to people who, through poverty, disability or similar disadvantages, might
otherwise never hear it. She achieves this in the simplest possible way: by
going and playing to them herself. Much of her work is conducted in Asia: Bangladesh,
Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Mongolia, Myanmar and Nepal have all been
beneficiaries of the project. Sri Lanka was, you might say, due a visit.
That she and her
studio members ended up at the Lionel Wendt, playing to a Colombo audience all
dressed to the nines, was, in a way, incidental. This wasn’t the gig they really
came to play. Over the previous few days, the maestra and her studio had already performed several times – at the
Victoria Home for Incurables at Rajagiriya, the Deaf & Blind School and the
MJF Special Needs School in Ratmalana, and at a home for the aged run by the
Little Sisters of the Poor, a Roman Catholic religious order, in Colombo. The
audiences for these shows comprised only the inmates and staff of the said
institutions. Apart from a few CMSC members, no outsiders were present.
I don’t suppose
many of those listeners were aficionados
of classical music, or had any idea who Midori was, but I was assured that they
enjoyed the music all the same. I am fully prepared to believe it. I have been
a regular at Chamber Music Society recitals for several years now, but though I
can tell Bach from Mozart and Vivaldi from Beethoven I wouldn’t call myself
knowledgeable about what people call classical music. Nevertheless, I found
myself perfectly able to engage with the music played at the ’Wendt that
Saturday night. How could I doubt that the institutional residents and students
who heard Midori and her group play earlier in their visit were any less delighted
than I?
˜
The audience, comprising long-term patrons and sponsors of
the Chamber Music Society, were in their seats well before curtain time and had
settled down nicely by the time the first performers entered stage right. These
were Jiyoung Park, the first of a long parade of soloists, and Jiayi Shi, the
pianist who was to perform their accompanying music. The young lady who helped
Ms Shi with her sheet music would later be identified as Yue Qian, another of
Midori’s violin students.
Ms Park gave us
Hindemith’s Sonata in E flat Major, a work written in 1918. Like many of the
other players we heard that evening, she is currently at USC Thornton, studying
for her doctorate under Prof. Goto (Midori’s academic alter ego) while carving out a concert career for herself. Her interpretation
of the Hindemith lived up to the composer’s own tempo instructions for the
first movement: frisch, or, in
English, ‘fresh’. Ms Park’s tone was like good Chablis: a little thin, with a
touch of acid, but vivid and invigorating just the same.
Next in the
programme was Chausson’s Poéme,
performed by Mei Ching Huang, a seasoned orchestral player (her credits include
the Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic and the San Diego
Symphony) for whom the piece was barely an appetizer. Poéme is, of course, popular with audiences for its moody rises and
falls, but I found myself less captivated by it than by Ms Huang’s second
offering, Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz in a
transcription by Nathan Milstein that made the famous work sound more
diabolical than ever. A New York Times
critic once wrote that Milstein’s transcription ‘pared down’ Liszt’s music, with
‘repetitions eliminated, harmonies altered, leaving only Mephisto, the
violinist, executing sweeps and pluckings that composed a frightening concordance
of instrumental daring.’ That describes Ms Huang’s performance pretty well,
too, and I need only add that her cherry-red stiletto heels made Mephisto seem
even more devilish than usual. This old man’s breath was well and truly taken
away.
A change of mood
was provided by the next soloist, Yabing Tan, who played Fritz Kreisler’s
arrangement of Dvořák’s Songs My
Mother Taught Me. Its soft, rather sentimental melody was well served by
the performance, though Ms Tan herself appeared rather fierce, perhaps due to
the various electronic bleats and tweets now being given off by barbarians in
the audience. By this time, however, I had become utterly charmed by Jiayi Shi’s
piano-playing. I learnt later that Ms Shi is Midori’s own principal
collaborator, working with the maestra
on her concert and recital schedules as well as in her work with violin
students. The versatility she demonstrated on this night was staggering, but
what was still more impressive was the musicality and sensitivity of expression
she brought to every piece. Although she never upstaged a soloist, there were
moments when my ear, of its own volition, found itself attending more to the
piano than the violin.
The first part
of the programme came to a climax with the appearance of Midori herself. She
had chosen to perform the Sonata in B Minor for Violin & Piano by Ottorino
Respighi, an intense, harmonically tricky composition in three movements that
takes about twenty-five minutes to play. I had never heard it before and I fear
the attention it demanded from me as a first-time listener was stolen instead
by the sound and sight of Midori. In contrast to the elegantly gowned soloists
who had appeared so far, she was dressed down, in a printed smock and
nondescript pants, her long hair secured by a simple slide. Her comportment,
too, was in marked contrast to the soloists’, for in place of their formal,
almost hieratic decorum Midori danced – bobbing and weaving like a bantamweight
prizefighter, attacking her priceless three hundred-year-old fiddle with exuberant
slashes and stabs of her bow. The sound she generated from the instrument was
huge: ripe and round and luxuriant, intrinsically laced with drama. Twenty-five
minutes went past in what seemed like four or five, and I am afraid you will
have to press somebody else for a detailed critique of the performance for it
was, I confess, too fiery a draught for my inexperienced head.
˜
After a short interval – a necessary respite post Respighi – the programme continued
with the Melody from Orfeo ed Euridice in a violin and piano
transcription by Fritz Kreisler. The piece featured the first male soloist of
the evening, James McFadden Talbot. Gluck’s lovely, plaintive melody did its
usual work, but Talbot’s performance seemed somehow constrained, more correct
than heartfelt.
This piece by an
eighteenth-century composer of operas was followed, quite appropriately, by a
work from a living composer perhaps best known for his Grammy- and
Oscar-winning movie scores: the Sonata for Violin & Piano by John
Corigliani. It seemed to me not to have worn especially well since its debut in
1964; its Phrygian seconds and jazzy rhythms no longer seem as audacious as
they must have done half a century ago. The soloist was Chang He, a chamber
music and violin tutor at the Beijing Conservatory with a particular interest
in modern music.
Perhaps I would
have enjoyed this piece a little better if someone a few rows behind me had not
found it necessary to search inside an apparently labyrinthine plastic bag in
search of, I don’t know, a nose-bone or a loincloth or something. The crackling
plastic effectively drowned out the musicians and appeared to go on for hours. How
bizarre that a member of an invited audience should behave so boorishly; even
by Colombo’s ankle-high standards of public considerateness, it was a bit much.
Massenet’s familiar
Meditation Thaïs came next, featuring
Moni Simeonov on violin. A former doctoral student under Midori, Mr Simeonov
has now gained considerable eminence in his own right. The Meditation, in its original form, is a piece for solo violin and
small orchestra that even features a vocal chorus, though most of us know it
better in stripped-down form for violin and piano, or just piano. For Mr
Simeonov it was just the amuse-bouche
before the feast; although he made the yearning melody work its customary
magic, it was with the next piece that he really showed his mettle.
This was Ravel’s
Tzigane, a rhapsodic, at times
delirious affair originally written for solo violin and piano. Tzigane used to be in Midori’s own concert
repertoire – I don’t know if it still is – but Mr Simeonov’s approach was, to
my ear, less aggressively busy than his mentor’s. It was emphatic enough for
all that; this is a piece that demands the skills of a virtuoso, but Mr
Simeonov was not only equal to the challenge, he had enough technical headroom
left over to make the music affecting as well as dazzling. Politically-correct killjoys
might decry the unconscious Orientalism of this soi-disant ‘gypsy’ composition, but for this audience member at
least, Tzigane offered the evening’s
most perfect combination of music, musician and moment.
But we were not
yet done with Moni Simeonov, who then led his fellow-protégés in a dazzling
performance of Andrew Norman’s Gran
Turismo, a breathless gallop for eight violins that revives the old concerto da camera trick of passing
themes and musical fragments back and forth among the players – but these are
postmodernist fragments, all squalling glissandi and crashing dissonances. Historically
connected with USC Thornton, Norman’s piece is inspired by, among other things,
the video game of the same name, and it is, indeed, a sort of musical car race
in which the slightest misjudgement or hesitation would bring disaster. Gran Turismo was first performed in
2004, and I doubt that any audience member at the ’Wendt had heard it before,
even on record. When it was over there was an audible release of breath before
the applause began.
Another brief
interval followed – so brief, in fact, that the audience weren’t allowed to
leave their seats. The programme had already run well over time. But there was
one more work to be presented – a finale in which Midori and her group were
joined by members of the CMSC on violins, violas and basses. The piece was
Vivaldi’s Concerto in B Minor for Four Violins – an obvious bonbon to placate
an audience whose patience had been tested, for well over two hours at that
point, by some very challenging music. The four violinists were Ms Huang, an
award-winning Midori ex-student named Strauss Shi, the CMSC’s own Ursula Nelius
and Concertmaster de Saram. Midori herself took the stage as a supporting
player. The whole thing had the air of a family knees-up at Christmastime – an
effect enhanced by the decision of the Society players (LJdeS and Ms Nelius
excepted) to dress down as Midori had done. I must confess to being rather displeased
by the effect this created on stage; the contrast between the elegant formality
of the soloists and the come-as-you-are motley of the Society players seemed to
imply a social as well as a musical distinction between them and Midori’s
people. Whose idea this was I do not know – whether the Society members decided
on their own, whether Midori requested it, or whether the dry cleaner simply
failed to get to the theatre on time – but it definitely shouldn’t have
happened. As for the Vivaldi itself, it was pretty good, and the Society
players held their own well enough, but by now my ears were too saturated with
music to pay close attention. We had been in our seats for nearly three hours.
˜
Afterwards my friends and I retired to the home of one of
us, where a coming-of-age birthday party was in progress. Isolating ourselves
from the celebrations and their thumping soundtrack, we talked late into the
night about what we had heard. Each of us had responded differently to
particular pieces, but all were in agreement that we had just been to one of
the best ‘classical’ concerts of our lives. I must add that none of us are
really regular concertgoers, so this isn’t as momentous a verdict as it would be
if it came from the music correspondent of the New York Times. All the same, we’re a critical crew, and the fact
that we were all equally impressed must be worth something.
As I said
before, I’m no expert on this kind of music, so I shan’t be indulging in any
kind of artistic or critical reflection here. I wrote this review mainly to
express how grateful I am – to Midori and the charity work that brought her to
Sri Lanka, to the brilliant young musicians who performed for us, to Lakshman
Joseph de Saram and the CMSC, and to the sponsors of the Society who met
one-third of the costs of Midori’s visit (the rest was funded by her charity)
and made it possible for me, personally, to hear all this great music.
Of course, the
most important beneficiaries of the initiative were not at the Lionel Wendt
that evening; but then, they’d gotten to hear the music before we did. It was
for them, not us, that Midori came to play, and they didn’t even have to leave home
to hear her. Lucky them. But lucky us, too.
Nawala
11 April 2018
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