Word: sonatas
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Wild's still omnipotent fingers transform the instrument into a source of marvels. He can electrify audiences with an impossibly demonic performance of Liszt's Mephisto Waltz, move them with an achingly tender account of a Sonetto del Petrarca by the composer or do both with the Manichean Sonata in B Minor...
...20th century composers are Barber, Hindemith and Stravinsky. Barber's sonata and Hindemith's third sonata present formidable interpretive and technical challenges. Yet Wild--who learned Barber's thorny score, with its treacherous final fugue, for this recording (in his 80s!)--tears into them with a scintillating blend of rhythmic acuity, dynamic and coloristic shadings and sustained dramatic power. He finds fresh charm in Stravinsky's opus by eliciting its whimsy and dancelike qualities. The 21st century sonata, Wild's own, is a virtuoso work--energetic, eclectic and flamboyant--that he plays with great panache...
Ferruccio Busoni's Second Sonata was the only really dull part of an otherwise excellent concert. The work opens and ends with a harmonically adventurous succession of chords, but everything in between, even when played beautifully (as it was), lacks in substance and fails to create a strong impression. I admire Schulte for his programming of obscure works, but perhaps he can concentrate his efforts on more deserving pieces...
...second piece, though, Faure's "Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano, Opus 13," displayed an intensity of feeling based firmly in knowledge of the music being played, which gave it an appeal only matched by the crowd-pleasing Heifetz Transcriptions at the end of the program. This was the most substantial piece in the recital, a formal four-movement sonata, and an illustration of Faure at his intimate best...
...second half of the concert opened with a moment characteristic of the whole performance; in the opening measures of the second movement of Strauss' three-movement "Sonata in E-flat Major for Violin and Piano, Opus 18," Perlman turned to the audience and raised his eyebrows expressively whilst playing the most beautiful melody-that subliminal expression on his face informed the feeling for the whole piece...