The James Lawrence Memorial Concert at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on Sunday featured violinist Johan Dalene and pianist Sahun Sam Hong in a thoughtful assortment of Romantic and modernist works. Their obvious friendship, coupled with deep musicianship and a youthful passion for interpreting the patrimony in their own voices, made for an exceptionally rewarding afternoon.
The magic of the violin eludes most who attempt to discover it. Many endeavor, but few succeed. The key is to go beyond technical mastery so as to fuse with the instrument so completely that human emotions alchemically transfigure into beauty. Starting off with Schumann’s Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano, Dalene produced a moody, pitch-perfect sound, ravishing and saturated with emotional meaning. His firm control allowed him to shift swiftly from weeping to bursts of defiant anger, exposing the soul bare but making nakedness itself lyrical. He and Hong were so perfectly attuned to each other that both piano and violin seemed to heave with the same emotion. Where the first movement soared to the sublime, the second movement explored tenderness as the sound of interiority, clothing the heart with voluptuous longing and hope as violin and piano supported each other with a lovely mutuality. The final “lively” movement brought forth a fugitive aesthetic, with Hong urging Dalene to run faster, farther, every note perfectly articulated, spelled out; and the two voices so matched in intonation and phrasing that violin and piano seemed to be carried on each other’s wings into the storm.
Dalene himself invited us to “picture a cold, vast Scandinavian night and forest” for Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Notturno. Hong opened with a vision of stillness, creating space though modulated dynamics to suggest near/far changes in focus. When Dalene entered, the violin suggested a savoring of the stillness through mystical contemplation, attuning the heart to limitless quietude. In contrast, Rautavaara’s Danza prompted a vivacious, sparkling piano, quickening Dalene’s pulse and provoking the violin to buzz and frolic. We heard a lively pas de deux in a mysterious nature full of puzzles and traps, deceptions, and rewards.
Two short but charmingly enticing works introduced us to Gratyna Bacewicz (a fellow violinist, Dalene told us). In Kolysanka (Lullaby), a maternal and reassuring violin sang tenderly into the realm of dreams against a gently rocking, meditative piano, ending exquisitely at the moment when consciousness swings mysteriously into sleep. Bacewicz’s second piece, Humoresque, with its demonic harmonics and pizzicato and its whiff of Don Giovanni’s boastful Champagne Aria, sent the two partners into a vertiginous act of tumbling and satire, rhythmic chaos and libidinal illusionism.
Suddenly dead serious, Hong hushed the piano to perfect silence for Dalene to commence the opening dirge of Ravel’s Tzigane. Dalene now transformed his tone into the mournful, desolate, and inconsolable cry of the gypsy, expressing what we the sedentary hide and deny: the cruelty and incomprehensible finitude of the human condition. Dalene took us through rebellion (think Ivan Karamazov) and a whole range of recusal leading to an exquisite vanishing point. Hong entered with rippling gestures, inviting the violin to accept melody and lean into dance and rhythm for comfort, until both negotiated their way through pizzicato and humor into a frenzied, powerful, explosive gallop, swirling faster and faster into a celebration of life.
Dalene and Hong gave Lili Boulanger’s D’un matin de printemps its full importance. They exploited colorful, sensual harmonics to create a convincing joie-de-vivre in the here and now, on the verge of the abyss. Dalene gave us a wistful innocence tinged with desire, while Hong imbued the space with airy beauty, like sunlight dappling our hearts. Here, Hong was the virtuoso, scaling realms.
Hong warned us that Witold Lutosławski’s Partita for Violin and Piano is “a very extreme piece.” They performed it with chilling depth and mastery, sparing us not an iota of terror, providing us with no place to gain a footing. They told us loud and clear: “There is no place to hide!” Heart-wrenching and absolutely despairing, each one of the five movements plunged us further into a random and cruel world that wants to see us crushed. Warsaw during the German occupation? Tornado devouring a trailer park in Kansas? In the final movement, I felt that the violin and piano had become each other’s tormentor, before both are swept away by engulfing forces.
Grieg’s Violin Sonata No. 2 in G Major brought us back to a more familiar sound and restored our capacity for denial. Hong’s piano led a journey from sadness to joy by charming Dalene’s violin into letting go of past grief in order to look forward. Time and time again, the sheer beauty of Hong’s tone called Dalene’s to express the grace of the moment and join the dance of life. Exquisite expressions of pain in the lower register of the violin gradually gave way to the keyboard’s sparkle and forward, swirling drive. Keep the faith, they told us.
The two friends treated us to Sibelius’s Lullaby as a parting gem. Strangely solemn, caring, with exquisite high notes and lovingly human low tones, their encore sent us off with a sort of peaceful courage.
Leon Golub is an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge and has been a lover of classical music for over 50 years.