Jourdan Urbach, Violinist in Review

Jourdan Urbach, Violinist in Review
Karen Beluso, Piano
Le Poisson Rouge; New York, NY
April 1, 2011

 

April 1st was host to a Children Helping Children benefit concert held at Le Poisson Rouge, a popular music venue and bar in downtown Greenwich Village. CHC’s young, exuberant founder and director, Jourdan Urbach, delivered a vibrant, virtuosic violin performance with the help of his much-appreciated pianist Karen Beluso. (Joining the dynamic duo later in the program was mezzo-soprano Gabrielle Lowell.) The evening featured arrangements of jazz-age golden oldies, as well as a number of Urbach’s original compositions.

Urbach started out the night strong with a lighthearted rendition of George Gershwin’s “Porgy & Bess”, arranged by “3 nice, Jewish boys” (Gershwin, Heifetz, and Urbach), as comically noted in the program. Evident the moment he picked up his bow, the 19-year-old’s playing was superlative in every way. Urbach exhibited both impeccable technique and exquisite artistry in each piece that graced the room, reveling in the jazz and country undertones that flowed throughout the concert. Glimmers of a smile could be seen on the Yale student’s face whenever he executed a graceful portamento or flawless up-bow spiccato. In his difficult arrangements and compositions, Urbach is a violinist that dares to challenge himself and thrives. Beluso followed him perfectly, although the level of some of the compositions and arrangements would have been raised that extra notch had she been more featured.

The casual nature of the evening continued despite a few short interludes, concluding with the New York premiere of “Hope”, an operatic song cycle by Urbach. Gabrielle Lowell’s delivery of Emily Dickinson poems in English, Spanish, and Yiddish was appealing, but the work was not particularly memorable. Understandably, Urbach’s strength was manifested in the beginning and middle portions of the program, during which he made use of his classical education and signature blues style. The public should keep an eye on this up-and-coming philanthropist-musician. He is apt to go far on his own ambition, delighting audiences every step of the way.

Chelsea Blakeburn for New York Concert Review; New York, NY

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So-Ock Kim, Violinist in Review

So-Ock Kim, Violinist in Review
Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall
Presented by the Korea Music Foundaton
March 17, 2011

So-Ock-Kim

Any violinist who chooses a program of unaccompanied music for a New York debut must be not only a consummate player and musician, but also possess extraordinary courage and self-confidence. So-Ock Kim has all these qualities in abundance; this recital was one of the most remarkable in recent memory.

Born in Korea in 1982, Ms. Kim moved to London at the age of  three. She became the youngest Gold Medalist of the Shell/LSO Competition at 15, and at 19 was selected for the Young Artists Concert Trust. Her worldwide performances in recital, with major orchestras and at important festivals were often broadcast on radio and television. Keenly interested in contemporary music, Ms. Kim has presented and recorded several world premieres of new works.

Ms. Kim’s program featured some of the most difficult unaccompanied works in the literature: the Chaconne from Bach’s D minor Partita, Bartók’s formidable Sonata, and Nos. 2, 3 and 4 of Ysaÿe’s six sonatas Op. 27, written by the greatest virtuoso of his time and dedicated to his violinist friends. Ms. Kim, a slender, delicate-looking young woman, performed these powerful, dramatic works (all in minor keys) triumphantly and without a hint of fatigue. She even had enough stamina for a brilliant encore: Francisco Tarrega’s “Recuerdo de la Alhambra.”

In the Bartók, she not only handled the instrumental challenges – double stops, chords, jumps, harmonics – with ease and security; she gave each movement its own character and also brought out both the work’s baroque and folk elements with admirable feeling for the Hungarian idiom. The Ysaye Sonatas pay homage to their dedicatees by emulating their own styles: Jacques Thibaud in No.2, Fritz Kreisler in No.3, and Mathieu Crickboom in No 4. They exploit but also expand the technical and tonal resources of the violin, and demand the kind of virtuosity that combines reckless abandon with total control. Ms. Kim took all their hurdles in stride and displayed remarkable stylistic versatility.

No program of unaccompanied violin music would be complete without Bach, but Ms. Kim’s performance of the Chaconne seemed dutiful rather than spontaneous, indicating that the baroque is not her most natural habitat. She tried to recreate the style solely by playing without vibrato; she made little attempt to bring out the voice leading, either in the chords or the melodic lines; she tended to change tempo arbitrarily and overemphasized the phrasing. However, her technical playing was no less excellent than it was throughout the rest of the recital: in perfect command of fingers and bow, flawless in intonation, pure and beautiful in sound.

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Hlif Sigurjonsdottir, Violinist in Review

 Hlif Sigurjonsdottir, Violinist in Review
Merkin Concert Hall, New York NY
January 15, 2011

Hlíf Sigurjóns

Violinist Hlif Sigurjonsdottir was born in Copenhagen and grew up in Iceland, where she began her musical studies at an early age. Going on to work with many eminent musicians in Europe, Canada and the United States, she credits her first teacher, Bjorn Olafsson, concertmaster of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, and her last teacher, Gerald Beale of New York, with inspiring her to make a specialty of Bach’s solo sonatas and partitas, and with leaving a strong mark on her approach to them. At this concert, she performed the Sonatas No. 2 and 3 and the Partita No. 1, completing the cycle begun earlier in New York. She has also released a double CD of all six works.

Ms. Sigurjonsdottir’s Bach was a mixture of many styles, part baroque, part contemporary, part oriented to violinistic comfort and effect. Playing on a modern violin by Christophe Landon and with bows by Landon and Isaac Salchow, she produced a very small tone that never varied in color or intensity and only rarely in volume. Her intonation was excellent except in the high positions; her bowing technique was light and flexible, but she broke all chords upward, regardless of where the melody lay. She made no attempt to use the four strings of the violin to bring out Bach’s voice-leading, changing strings and positions for greatest technical convenience rather than contrapuntal clarity. Perhaps the performance’s most serious shortcoming was a lack of variety; there was hardly any difference of character or expression among these three very diverse works or their highly contrasting movements.

Today, the practice of performing from memory is ubiquitous, but, from a music-historical viewpoint, it is comparatively recent. (Toscanini, whose vision was very poor, introduced it to conducting with the dictum “Better to have the score in your head than your head in the score.”) Many soloists claim that not looking at the music is liberating, but it can also have the opposite effect. (Clifford Curzon, the great English pianist, decided to use the score for the Mozart concertos when he realized that many passages were so similar that he sometimes found himself playing the wrong one.) Bach’s works for solo violin are treacherous to memorize, and Ms. Sigurjonsdottir was ill-advised to attempt it. She got lost in the First Partita, but adroitly covered it up by going back to the beginning of the movement; finally, though, she had to have a stand and the music brought to the stage. In the formidable Fugue of the Third Sonata, however, her memory slip caused chaos: two stands were required to accommodate the music, which consisted of many single sheets so mixed up that a volunteer had to come to the stage from the audience to help put them in order and stay to act as page-turner. This added a charming touch of informality to the concert, but disrupted the Sonata. However, the rest of the performance was so much more confident and secure that one wished Ms. Sigurjonsdottir had used the score from the beginning.

The program included the premiere of the Prelude from a five-movement sonata written for her by Merrill Clark, entitled “The Sorceress.” A lively, propulsive piece, it is based on a repetitive figure of a major second using a drone-like open string.  The composer was present to share the applause.

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