SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Borodin, Tchaikovsky, and Shostakovich: Gerard Schwarz, cond., Leonidas Kavakos, violin, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 5.11.2009 (BJ)

Few ovations can have erupted in Benaroya Hall’s eleven years of concerts to match the roar that followed Leonidas Kavakos’s performance of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto on this memorable Thursday evening. And though star appeal without corresponding artistic gifts is an all too common phenomenon, on this occasion the playing fully justified the enthusiasm.

Kavakos ranks among the greatest instrumentalists of our time. Equipped with a formidable technique, the charismatic Greek drew from his 1782 Guadagnini violin a tone at once pure, warm, and voluminous, seeming to sail effortlessly through the richest orchestral textures. Within the past three years, he has given Seattle concertgoers superlative performances of Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto and Shostakovich’s late, great sonata for the instrument. Now it was heartening to find him equally at home in a standard romantic concerto that is too often treated as a mere vehicle for technical display. While throwing off the virtuoso passage-work with thrilling brilliance, he yet fully realized all the elegance and nobility he has said he finds in the piece.

The all-Russian program ended with Shostakovich. A much more ambivalent work than the Tchaikovsky, the composer’s 15th and last symphony plumbs extraordinary depths of expression and yet avoids any hint of bombast or overstatement. Much of it plays out at intensely quiet dynamic levels, sometimes on the brink of inaudibility. The effect reminds me of certain people who speak very softly–though their sheer restraint reveals that tempests lurk just beneath the unemphatic surface.

Nearly 40 years ago, reviewing Eugene Ormandy’s American premiere of the work in Philadelphia, I found it to be a marvelous piece of music, full of melody and subtle poetry. It made that first impression despite a performance that I recall as anaemic and under-characterized in comparison with the vividness, profundity, and sheer controlled power that the Seattle Symphony brought to it under the baton of Gerard Schwarz, a Shostakovich exponent second to none.

In the nature of the piece, important instrumental solos abound, and all of them were beautifully played. I cannot fail to mention in particular Ko-ichiro Yamamoto’s superb trombone solo, Eric Gaenslen’s and Jordan Anderson’s eloquent cello and bass solos, and the immaculate contributions of Scott Goff and Zartouhi Dombourian-Eby on flute and piccolo.

On such a program, Borodin’s unfinished Third Symphony could not stand as anything more than a curtain-raiser. But it was a thoroughly enjoyable one, and it too received a fine performance, launched by Ben Hausmann’s sensuous oboe solo.

Bernard Jacobson