I know it sounds like the name of one of those semi-shady Dickensian firms of solicitors, but my title actually refers to the two star performers in last weekend’s events at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. In two separate programs presented by Cal Performances, Bay Area audiences were treated to surprisingly intimate encounters — surprising in a hall that size, I mean — with Stefan Jackiw and Joshua Bell, two of the best solo violinists in America today. What was interesting to me was how different the two experiences were.
Let me start with the Joshua Bell concert on Sunday, February 21, since that was in some ways the more predictable pleasure. The audience for the sold-out event was expecting wonders from Bell, which had the inevitable side-effect of making the marvels in question seem somewhat less wondrous. It’s not that it was a boring program — quite the contrary. Anything that starts with a Bach sonata, progresses through Grieg and Schumann, and ends up with the ravishing Ravel Sonata for Violin and Piano is bound to produce excitement. In Bell’s case, because he is even better at romantic and modern pieces than he is at baroque, the concert was a steady progression from good to great. He was accompanied, or let us say partnered, by the wonderful pianist Jeremy Denk, who is himself an acclaimed soloist, but who has the kind of self-effacing modesty and attentiveness to his fellow-performer that makes him the ideal second figure for a concert of this kind. The entire afternoon was completely enjoyable, and the Ravel was more than that: it was eye-opening, pleasurably startling, foot-tappingly jazzy, and obviously difficult to pull off with such finesse. Having heard this singular performance, I will never think of Maurice Ravel in the same way again.
The Friday night concert with Stefan Jackiw was in many ways the opposite kind of situation. Jackiw appeared as the soloist in the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D Major, performed by the Russian National Orchestra under the direction of Mikhail Pletnev. I have to admit that I was drawn to the concert by the presence of Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony later in the program; I had never even heard of the young soloist scheduled to play in the violin concerto. Boy, was I in for a surprise, and so was everyone else. Jackiw, a tall, willowy young man with beautiful half-Asian features and the aura of listening for instructions from outer space (or from wherever it is that dead composers reside), performed his part with such verve, such delicacy, such feeling for the details and the overall shape of the piece, as well as such truly remarkable technical ability, that the audience burst into applause after the first movement as well as after the Finale. This was not a sign of audience ignorance, as it sometimes is: they all kept appropriately silent in all the other movement breaks of the evening. But this first appearance by the previously unknown soloist was so overwhelming that they — or, I should say, we—could hardly keep our hands in our laps.
He would have won my regard under any circumstances, but my sense of appreciation was augmented by the fact that the rest of the concert into which he had been sandwiched was noticeably unpleasant. We began with a series of Yeats poems set to music by the conductor himself (always, or at least usually, a bad sign); we ended, after the intermission, with the most lackluster, blandly noncommittal performance of the Shostakovich symphony imaginable. Granted, this is a very strange, intentionally unreadable piece of music — unreadable in the way a face is, when it wants to keep its owner’s feelings hidden. But that unreadability turned into downright shallowness and impenetrability in the hands of Pletnev and his Russian National Orchestra, who refused to commit themselves to any kind of coherent interpretation.
Luckily, I had the Jackiw performance to reflect back on as I tried to ignore the jazz-lite sounds emanating from the orchestra during its repeated (and excessive) encores. These curtain-closers, too, were in marked contrast to Jackiw’s own brief encore, a haunting, moving rendition of a Bach Largo that showed he was as good at slow, quiet music as he was at the more virtuosic and excitable outpourings of Tchaikovsky. A rare gem indeed.
—February 22, 2010