A Familiar Ring
Only 55 but still youthful-looking, violinist Joshua Bell has been one of the brightest fixtures in our musical constellation for four decades now. His all-American boyish charm, frequent appearances on mainstream media like the “Tonight Show,” “Mozart In The Jungle,” and many others, his internationally publicized subway-fiddling stunt here in Washington, and a large catalog of recordings (including the soundtrack for the film “The Red Violin”) have combined for a bulletproof career. His recital last night in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall (presented by Washington Performing Arts) drew a healthy crowd, at least 3/4ths full, and they hung on his every note.
As well they had to; though physically animated, Bell plays in an intimate style better suited for the recording studio than a large concert hall. Of all the top violinists today, Bell’s sonority is the thinnest, and he exacerbates the situation by letting his pianist (here, Peter Dugan) play with the instrument’s lid fully raised. He’s hardly alone in this recent fad, but it is really unfortunate as his sound was frequently swamped, sometimes disappearing altogether when both instruments were playing in rapid passage-work. Dugan kept the soft pedal down most of the evening, but it hardly mattered. I don’t know what today’s fiddlers think they’ve discovered that Stern, Francescatti, Oistrakh, Perlman, Heifetz, and Milstein (all of whom performed with the lid entirely down or on the small stick) didn’t know, but it is irritating for those of us who know and love the pieces and attend hoping to hear all the notes the composers wrote, in proper balance.
The program was another disappointment of sorts; three standard sonatas and the Bloch Nigun, works he’s played his entire career and could’ve phoned in. Bell has traversed a far wider swath of repertoire than he brought last night, but his musicianship is always illuminating. In particular, Bell brought out ambiguous emotional states in the middle two movements of the Schumann D minor Sonata that pointed up the composer’s impending mental collapse. In the Beethoven Op. 12 Sonata and the evergreen Franck Sonata, Bell’s subtleties of bowing (when they could be heard) created a lovely chiaroscuro, the violin seeming to change shape and color as he played. He is a thoughtful musician as much as a virtuoso, but his preternatural hand coordination allows him to produce extraordinary clarity in the fastest passages.
Dugan (who’s also the radio host of “From The Top”) is a fine pianist I’d never heard before. There was not a lot of individuality, but he was nearly note-perfect all evening, save for the treacherous final pages of the Franck. Their two encores were a gentle Romance by Clara Schumann and the Wieniawski Scherzo-Tarantelle, which Bell dispatched at a Heifetzian tempo.
