Here is my July 21 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Monday July 19, 2010 recital by violinist Midori with pianist Özgür Aydin at Ravinia's Martin Theatre.
Midori's mastery on full view here
REVIEW | Violinist plays like a dream
As hard as it might seem to envision, the former child violin phenomenon Midori has become in many ways an even more phenomenal adult.
Famously coming to worldwide attention at age 11 with Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic, the Japanese-born musician also famously left the renowned Juilliard teacher Dorothy DeLay four years later at just 15 to choose "freedom, with risks, over safety." Her career has never skipped a beat since.
She has founded and directs no fewer than four major not-for-profit programs, ranging from one that brings music to the disadvantaged and abused in such remote places as Mongolia and Laos to her commitment to play concerts and recitals in smaller cities, from Covington, Louisiana, to Fargo, North Dakota. Even when she is in the Chicago area, she always visits the Merit School of Music downtown. This week she spent Sunday working with two advanced scholarship students there. Last season she chose Elgin as the site for one of her weeklong Orchestra Residency Programs.
And, yes, she still plays like a dream -- a serious dream, no doubt. But she is both totally focused and otherworldly onstage. Monday night before a large Martin Theatre audience at Ravinia, with the fine young Turkish-American collaborative pianist Özgür Aydin, she bracketed the 19th century with masterworks of the young Beethoven and the mature Brahms and played mystical pieces from the early 20th century by Ernest Bloch and Karol Szymanowski.
The Bloch Second Sonata, "Poème mystique" (1924), and the Szymanowski "Mythes" (1916) were surely new to most listeners and, with the exception of the first of the three Szymanowski sections, were having their first Ravinia performances. Although separated by the intermission, these pieces spoke a parallel language of harmonies and melodies unmoored by tradition but touched by folk traditions and a Debussyian sense of what antique Greek music might have sounded like.
The Beethoven A Minor Fourth Sonata, Op. 23, had moments where Midori and Aydin seemed to be settling in with each other and the hall. But the closing Brahms D minor Third Sonata, Op. 108, was on fire and intriguingly informed by the ethereal pieces that preceded it. An encore of a Henryk Wieniawski "Souvenir of Moscow" showed how Midori, at 38, can fill even a showpiece with human warmth and intelligence. What a life she is leading.
Comments