SERGEY KHACHATRYAN AT WIGMORE HALL
Neil Fisher

The Times
March 20, 2009
UK

It’s the hardest lesson to master, because it can’t be taught. Sure,
the musician has found out how to play Bach, Brahms or Beethoven,
but has he found his own voice, too — the one that ultimately draws
the audience to come back to him?

When it comes to Sergey Khachatryan, the answer is a huge, huge yes.

There’s a big, glossy heap of talented violinists at the moment,
but what separates this young Armenian from the pack isn’t just the
rich sound of his Strad (the 1708 "Huggins", if you’re interested in
such things); it’s how forcefully, how individually he deploys it. By
the end of this recital, delivered with another Khachatryan (Lusine,
his sister) at the piano, I felt so convinced that his way was going
to be the right way that what the critical pen was scribbling on the
critical notebook seemed pretty irrelevant.

Perhaps the biggest surprise about Khachatryan is that his choices
aren’t the obvious ones: he’s not one of those firecrackers who
confuse pace and volume with energy and intensity. Opening with Bach’s
unaccompanied D minor Partita he shirked anything to do with lean,
limber Bach and went for old-fashioned, spacious Romanticism. But there
was a wealth of expressive detailling here: the Courante was driven and
tense; an intimat e Sarabande breathed into life like a whisper in the
dark. And then that mighty Chaconne, in Khachatryan’s hands a restless
search for beauty that felt like an epic but never felt overwrought:
it drew you in, rather than reaching beyond Bach’s natural austerity.

Brahms’s Violin Sonata No 1 came next, introducing a sibling
partnership that clearly thought the same way: reflection over
showmanship. Violinist and pianist handled it with rapt affection and
the sort of noncholant, natural charm that could only mean hours in
the practice room.

Then, another demon of the repertoire, Beethoven’s Kreutzer sonata,
and another surprise. Its obsessive rhythms and repeated refrains
normally scream high-octane drama, but it was the soulful tang of
Khachatryan’s Strad that led the way, and what stayed in the mind was
actually the soft, middle movement, a tender set of variations served
up with sprung, silken elegance. A spell-binding encore, an arrangement
of Rachmaninov’s Vocalise, rounded things off. By then, the notebook
had long been abandoned: one for the personal archive instead.