ELECTRIC VIOLINIST
By Bradley Bambarger
Star-Ledger Staff
Newark Star Ledger, New Jersey
March 21 2006
Jarvi and London Philharmonic bring rising star to Newark concert
The London Philharmonic Orchestra’s latest tour of the U.S. has had
its share of challenges. The group’s principal conductor, Kurt Masur,
was to lead the tour, but had to pull out due to a viral infec tion.
Neeme Jarvi, music director of the New Jersey Symphony Orches tra,
was one of several conductors enlisted to cover the tour. But,
hav ing fallen ill, too, Jarvi pulled out of the March 12 date in
San Francisco, which Roberto Minczuk covered (as he did yesterday’s
Lincoln Center concert).
But Jarvi was in Newark with the London Philharmonic at the New
Jersey Performing Arts Center on Sunday afternoon, having also led
the orchestra in Greenvale, Calif., the day before. Fit as a fiddle,
he seemed to relish conducting such a sleekly powerful ensemble in
one of his “home” halls. Although the players looked a bit glum,
Jarvi managed to elicit some smiles with his enthusiastic gestures
and occasional hoochie-coochie swaying.
Veterans in the LPO are familiar with Jarvi from’90s’ recording
ses sions of Medtner, Bruckner and Reger. The repertoire wasn’t so
imposing at Prudential Hall, starting with Britten’s Simple Symphony,
the composer’s buoyant recasting of sketches from his youth. This
neo-Baroque suite for strings isn’t all light as air, though. In the
Sara bande section, the London violins had not only surface sheen,
but a crying depth of feeling. The Sara bande’s ideally soft ending
belied what little experience Jarvi and the orchestra had together
in the score.
For all the charms of the Brit ten, the day belonged to Aram
Khachaturian’s 1940 Violin Concerto — and the soloist for the piece,
a 21-year-old fellow Armenian and near-namesake, Sergey Khachatryan.
That this is a sorely undervalued score might be apparent to those
who have heard the pioneering recordings by David Ois trakh and Leonid
Kogan. But Kha chatryan’s electric performance made a case for a work
that would be hard for any music lover to deny.
Frequenters of NJPAC have had the chance to hear exceptional young
violinists in recent seasons, including the Georgian Elisabeth
Batiashvili (in Sibelius) and the Dutch Janine Jansen (Britten).
Khachatryan was their equal — and he needed to be, as Khachatu rian’s
concerto demands that the soloist spin out one long-breathed melody
after another. The violin ist’s face was as expressionless and dark
as his playing was expressive and colorful; his visage only softened
as he communed with the more reflective tunes, many derived from
Armenian folk tradition.
Khachatryan, who made a fine recording of this concerto in 2003,
pushed the first movement at a boldly exciting pace (as did Ois
trakh). But he was lyrically rumina tive in the solo cadenza — that
is, until its finish, where his double- stopping vibrated white-hot.
After the violinist caressed the slow movement like a cradle song and
surged through the rondo finale, the full house’s ovation wrested a
shy smile from him that grew as Jarvi led the applause for a fourth
curtain call.
Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, which Jarvi recently recorded with
Sweden’s Gothenburg Symphony, was the afternoon’s closer. Doleful and
balletic by turns, this music can be performed more viscerally, but
it would be rare to hear it played more romantically. In the autumnal
slow movement, the cellos sang out with proto-Hollywood sweep, and
the orchestra’s brass had their beautifully tuned say in the finale.
Surprisingly, given Jarvi’s pen chant and the convention for touring
ensembles, there was no en core. But he was obviously pleased, making
a show of eliciting applause for every section of the orchestra,
even wading back to shake hands with the double-bassists.
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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
