VIOLA DEPARTMENT RECITAL WITH NOBUKO IMAI / THE DEVIL'S VIOLINIST: PAGANINI'S CAPRICES / Review

VIOLA DEPARTMENT

RECITAL WITH NOBUKO IMAI

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory Concert Hall

Friday (17 February 2023)

 

THE DEVIL’S VIOLINIST:

PAGANINI’S CAPRICES

KEVIN ZHU, Violin

Victoria Concert Hall

Sunday (19 February 2023)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 24 February 2023 with the title "Dazzling performances by violist Nobuko Imai, violinist Kevin Zhu".

 

 

The humble viola has long been deemed the ugly step-sister of the glamourous violin, but this view looks ripe for revision. As a solo instrument, the viola is capable of great beauty and depth, as demonstrated by veteran Japanese violist Nobuko Imai, one of the world’s great exponents of the instrument.

 

Despite turning 80 years young next month, her energy and spirit would make even an 18-year-old blush. Her recital included the rare gem that is British-American composer Rebecca Clarke’s Viola Sonata (1919), a work so masterly that its earliest listeners could not imagine it was written by a woman. Imai projected the widest of sonorities possible on its Impetuoso opening movement, with pastoral charm and earthy textures made to sound absolutely ravishing.

 

Pianist Albert Tiu was an equal partner, not least in the scherzo-like central movement, possessed with elfin lightness and razor-keen reflexes. Its lengthy finale, a brooding essay in alternating fast and slow sections, laid bare the music’s emotional heart before closing in a passionate flourish.   

  

Toru Takemitsu’s A Bird Came Down The Walk (1995) was dedicated to Imai, a work that exploited the viola’s full palette of colours, from murky darkness to ethereal light and every shade in between. Its other-worldly stillness and rarefied harmonies also had an unsettling but strangely hypnotic effect. Schumann’s Märchenbilder (Fairy Tale Pictures) was the evening’s most familiar music, the duo basking in four movements constrasting singing lyricism with tempestuous asides.

It must have been a real honour for
young violist Joelle Hsu to perform
a Bartok duo with Nobulo Imai.

 

The recital also featured the conservatory’s strings in Dobrinka Tabakova’s neo-baroque Suite in Old Style, with Imai as soloist in varied dance movements, some involving jazzy rhythms. Closing the evening was a selection from Bartok’s 44 Duos for two violins, arranged for combinations of up to six violas, partnering Zhang Manchin (Head of viola) and four students. Seldom has massed violas sounded this delicious.

 

The violinist as indefatigable virtuoso and latter-day superstar began with the Italian Niccolo Paganini. His 24 Caprices (Op.1) for unaccompanied violin became the bible of transcendental violin technique. The recital of the complete set by young American violinist Kevin Zhu was not a Herculean wall of sound and fury, instead a nuanced one where musical values came to the fore.

 

Playing came as naturally as breathing for the 2018 winner of the Paganini International Violin Competition in Genoa, Italy. Nothing sounded effortful or forced, and his purity and robustness of tone was allied with matchless intonation. There was also a nervous energy, as if walking a tightrope, that had his listeners transfixed.

 

Performing the Caprices as groups of pairs, he graceously allowed the audience to applaud between pieces, and addressed them with a casualness and affability that was hard to dislike. The fiendish and fearsome pieces no longer intimidated, instead becoming friends with each tale he told.

Photo: Ung Ruey Loon / Altenburg Arts

 

Fast and mercurial numbers were made to sound almost easy, while more solemn ones, such as Caprice No.4 in C minor, were possessed with a true sense of nobility. No.6 (G minor), a study in tremolo, sounded as if it came from a strummed lute. The silky smoothness achieved in No.7 (A minor) and No.12 (A flat major) had to be heard to be believed. No.21 (A major), which carried the title Amoroso (lovingly), was a romance but no respite from the earlier exertions.

 

Finally, the most famous No.24 (A minor), in the form of theme and variations, became a summation of all the wonders that had come before. After bringing down the house, the audience was polled on which Caprice they wanted to hear again. It had to be No.24, naturally.