By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Some performers try to dazzle you with their brilliance and charisma. Others, though just as accomplished, take a more self-effacing approach to making music. That group includes the superb violinist Miranda Cuckson and the exemplary pianist Steven Beck, two young performers who teamed up for a deeply satisfying recital at Bargemusic in Brooklyn on Friday night.
Their program was artfully laid out. They began with Stravinsky’s seldom-heard “Pastorale” for violin and piano from 1933. Though the title might lead you to expect something bucolic, this is a bustling, spirited work, with a wandering violin line floating atop a busy, highly ornamented piano part. Along the way come some deceptively blasé shifts through far-ranging chords and keys. Here Stravinsky shows how to write a really clever novelty piece.
To present the Neo-Classical Stravinsky at his most inventive, Ms. Cuckson and Mr. Beck next played the substantive five-movement Duo Concertant from 1932. There is something Mozartean in the clarity and elegance of the music. Still, these performers brought out every bit of the tartly harmonic, multilayered, rhythmically fractured complexity of the piece.
Just before he turned 18 in 1928, the composer Samuel Barber, then a student at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, wrote a Violin Sonata that won a $1,500 prize. The piece was lost, or so we thought. Barbara Heyman, a noted Barber scholar and biographer, explained to the Bargemusic audience that, partly through her diligence, the manuscript to the third and final movement was discovered a few years ago. (The first two movements have still not turned up.) Ms. Cuckson and Mr. Beck gave the New York premiere.
Barber was enthralled with Brahms at the time, Ms. Heyman said, and that infatuation comes through in this impassioned finale, rich with roaming harmonies and thick piano sonorities. There is also refinement, à la Fauré, in the music. Yet the ingenious Barber of the pulsing Piano Sonata makes a trial appearance here as well.
After intermission Ms. Cuckson and Mr. Beck gave an engrossing account of Fred Lerdahl’s Duo for Violin and Piano (2005). Both the near-frenzied first movement and the more pensive second movement of this 15-minute work unfold in a series of episodic gestures, full of spiraling piano flights and cyclic violin riffs. Whenever the violin turns dreamy, in the first movement, the music, led by the piano, bursts into pummeling patterns of punchy, chiseled descending chords.
Ms. Cuckson and Mr. Beck finished with Poulenc’s Violin Sonata (1942-43). Poulenc was enormously influenced by Stravinsky’s Neo-Classical style. Amid the rippling piano runs and fanciful violin writing, this music pulses with rigorous counterpoint and brittle harmonic writing that recall Stravinsky. Yet during this period Poulenc believed that music, like life, should be charming. So touches of a Paris salon gathering and hints of tangos appear.
The audience could not have asked for a finer performance of this demanding piece. Nor for better summer evening weather to enjoy on Brooklyn’s floating concert hall.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/arts/music/21barge.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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