The most successful marriages are often those in which partners feel free to express themselves, but also agree to support each other in mutual endeavors. That’s also true in chamber music partnerships, particularly those involving a pianist and a violinist. Audiences sometimes forget that a “violin sonata” is really a sonata for piano and violin in which the two instrumentalists are equal in importance.
This applied Saturday evening in Jordan Hall when the Franck Sonata was performed by violinist Nancy Zhou and pianist Weicong Zhang. Their performance of the sonata, which was among the finest this listener has heard in the last 30-odd years, concluded their recital, which was sponsored by the Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts.
The Franck Sonata, which oft frequents concerts, has always attracted the most celebrated violinists, but it fails without an equally strong pianist — because the part for the piano is among the most difficult in in the chamber music repertory. Fiddle players call it “the Frank Sinatra.”
Written in 1886 and dedicated to the Belgian violinist, Eugène Ysaÿe, it has color, strength, fire, and enough outbursts by each instrument to keep listeners engaged. It also has enough rhythmic repetition and thematic consistency from movement to movement to make it not only an extremely cohesive work, but also a dangerous one. In his memoirs, Richter said that without a partner like Oistrakh, he found it banal, histrionic, and tedious — all at the same time!
Zhou and Zhang avoided such pitfalls. From the moment it began, under an Allegretto ben moderato marking, the interpretation showed forward motion in which the two musicians responded sensitively to each other in the alternative poising and going of the line. When the music required Zhang to take off in an impulsive manner, Zhou would bring the warm-toned new American Steinway back to its ruminative brooding. With both force and irresistible delicacy, each tamed the other’s outbursts. They brought the movement to a retrospective, if uneasy, close.
In the Allegro, however, the pianist again sets the stage for sound and fury, to which Zhou always responds with a spun-out line that eventually brings the movement to another peaceful close. Zhou and Zhang achieved and sustained a dream-like tone in the Ben moderato: Recitativo-Fantasia movement. The canonic Allegretto poco mosso found the duo singing together as elegant divas, leaving the audience, in a state of bliss.
Terrific from the beginning, the concert had begun with an infectiously enthusiastic performance of Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne. Zhou and Zhang endowed the charming neo-classicism with an impressively wide range of color, maintaining its incisiveness and driving momentum that respected Stravinsky’s clipped nostalgia
Respighi’s Sonata in B Minor was a favorite of both Jascha Heifetz and Ginette Neveu. Mentioning those names as champions of this work gives an idea of how challenging it is. Zhou played it with a wide palette on her elegant Carlo Bergonzi (1683 – 1747) instrument. Her chromatic slides and intense vibrato wonderfully suited the florid post-Romanticism and Zhang antically supported the violinist at every turn and displayed throughout a keen ear for dynamic shadings, particularly in the slow movement. The pair allowed the demanding Passacaglia to close the set almost effortlessly. Arvo Part’s Fratres preceded the tumult of the Franck Sonata with a sparkling and other-worldly take on the Estonian composer’s trippy, incantational, mystical, fractalating, change ringing.