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Violin Odyssey
Itamar Zorman (violin)
Ieva Jokubaviciute, Kwan Yi (piano)
Julia Thompson (tambourine)
rec. 2021, Baldwin Auditorium, Duke University, USA
FIRST HAND RECORDS FHR119 [76]

The Violin Odyssey of the title is geographical, though it’s also stylistic, and was born during lockdown when Itamar Zorman was casting around for new repertoire. He has decided to organise his programme around two sonatas, composed a decade apart, but representing very different traditions, about which satellite a series of shorter works with engaging titles.

It might be best to start with those two sonatas. The first is Dora Pejačevic’s Sonata in B flat minor, her second sonata, written in 1917. It’s an almost defiantly late-Romantic three-movement piece, and strongly argued throughout, with a good, though not especially distinctive slow movement, and a much more Slavonic finale, fast and fiery and exceptionally vivid. It’s almost as if she needed an Allegro molto vivace to unshackle herself from constraints. The other sonata is Schulhoff’s Second, written in 1927. Coursing with the excitement of the new – with jazz rhythms and a sardonic Burlesca – this gives both players quite a lot to bite into. I rather wish Zorman and Kwan Yi had taken the opening at a tempo that stressed the impetuoso quality of the Allegro rather more. Jiří Tomášek and Josef Růžíčká on Praga (PR 255 006) generate just such a tension in their playing, but at their somewhat more sedate tempo Zorman and Yi do well by the expressive, elliptical slow movement.

In a wide-ranging and entertainingly varied programme we visit Bacewicz’s Poland for her bright and zesty Oberek No.1 and linger a little longer over eight of the twenty little movements from Joseph Achron’s Children’s Suite in Jascha Heifetz’s arrangement for violin from the piano originals. These charming Kinderszenen find Zorman and Yi on fine form, never overweighting the pieces with too much tonal breadth but also paying due diligence to the titles – No.4 Mama Tell a Fairy Tale is an injunction well met by this pairing who play with deft authority. Incidentally the Alla marcia sounds proto or even post-Prokofiev, rhythmically.

Revueltas is always an intriguing composer and the two songs here date from 1924. These slices of demotic life are to do with the shriek of a knife on the wheel and the calls of a vendor of clay pots – a kind of The Cries of Mexico. Ali Osman died in 2017 and his Afromood dates from 2010 and, with the addition of Julia Thompson’s one-woman rhythm section on tambourine, this turns out to be a lightly rocking piece. Rather more meditative, one outburst aside, is Gao Ping’s Questioning the Mountains which ponders over a Szechuan folk song via glissandi and soft ornaments. New Zealander Garth Farr’s Wakatipu employs Balinese rhythms in places and takes the violin very high in his piece inspired by a Māori folk tale. Finally, there is Summerland by William Grant Still, originally one of the Three Visions for solo piano but arranged by the composer for violin and long ago memorably recorded by Louis Kaufman. In fine sound, Korman and Ieva Jokubaviciute – there are two pianists alternating throughout the disc – make for a very plausible up-to-date recommendation.

Documentation here is first class and includes music examples and a reproduction of a relevant Revueltas manuscript. With a fine recording balance, too, this is a trip worth taking.

Jonathan Woolf

Contents
Grazyna BACEWICZ (1909–1969)
Oberek No. 1 (1949) [1:42]
Moshe ZORMAN (b.1952)
Wanderings (1994) [2:16]
Joseph ACHRON (1886–1943)
Children’s Suite, Op. 57 (c. 1925) selections arr. Jascha HEIFETZ (1901–1987) [11:05]
Dora PEJAČEVIĆ (1885–1923)
Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in B flat minor, Op. 43, “Slavonic Sonata” (1917) [16:59]
Silvestre REVUELTAS (1899–1940)
Afilador (1924) [2:29]
Tierra p’a las macetas (1924) [2:11]
Ali OSMAN (1958–2017)
Afromood (2010) [5:36]
Gao PING (b.1970)
Questioning the Mountains (2008) [6:52]
Gareth FARR (b.1968)
Wakatipu (2009)
Erwin SCHULHOFF (1894–1942)
Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 (1927) [17:19]
William Grant STILL (1895–1978)
Summerland (1935) [3:57]