Regardless of the fixed emergence of recent virtuoso violin ‘superstars’ from everywhere in the world in western classical music, Midori, now 53, nonetheless stands out.
She was the epitome of the “baby prodigy”, a time period sadly too loosely used these days for a lot lesser capacity. At age six(!), she carried out all of the Paganini caprices and the J.S. Bach Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin.
She made her debut with the New York Philharmonic underneath the baton of Maestro Zubin Mehta at age 11 as a shock visitor soloist on the New 12 months’s Eve Gala in 1982. The remainder of her profession since then is the stuff of legend and music historical past.
Throughout my UK decade, I heard her simply as soon as, on the 2002 BBC Proms competition, when she performed Samuel Barber’s lyrical Violin Concerto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra carried out by Christoph Eschenbach.
However I hadn’t heard her in a extra intimate, recital setting. That is why once I discovered she can be taking part in in 2019 with pianist Ieva Jokubaviciute on the Tata Theatre, Nationwide Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) Mumbai, I made a devoted journey to the massive dangerous metropolis simply to listen to her. The duo additionally carried out a day earlier than this in Pune underneath the auspices of the Poona Musical Society.
On the danger of being repetitive (as I’ve stated this so typically), I believe it each a scandal and a travesty that for decade after irritating decade, Goa, regardless of such a centuries-old heritage of publicity to western music, continues to let itself be bypassed on the tour schedules of the world’s biggest exponents of western classical music, despite the fact that they arrive so tantalisingly shut. The result’s that technology after technology of our youth is rising up, fairly actually not understanding what they’re lacking. But grownup Goa has the wherewithal to convey mega-expensive drug-fuelled ‘festivals’ like Sunburn, overriding fashionable opposition (and it’s rumoured no less than one politician of the ruling institution traces his pockets in crores for ‘facilitating the extravaganza), however not for healthful soul-nourishing western classical music at a minuscule fraction of the price. As an alternative, the Goan populace is lulled into slumber consumed wolves’ milk and numbed by utter garbage about musical ‘Renaissance’ when anybody who actually has discerning ears to listen to and hear, is aware of it’s sheer mediocrity on provide as an alternative. Such hyperbole (whether or not ignorant or devious) praising any drivel so long as highlights caste friends deprives a first-generation listener and readership of any sense of perspective and proportion, as a result of they don’t have anything else (aside from the wealth on the web, in fact) to match it as yardstick with by way of reside live performance efficiency. Ignorance is bliss.
Much more tragicomic is the “reducing off one’s nostril to spite one’s face” syndrome. Catholic elite Goa would reasonably deprive their very own youngsters of alternatives to unearth, nurture and convey their musical potential to fruition than assist somebody not of their very own caste location who earnestly needs to do that. Much better (so goes their warped ‘logic’) to be in petty cost of shallow mediocrity than to danger relinquishing management. This mad obsession with “calling the photographs” and always eager to be within the limelight take priority over caring for their very own offspring’s holistic inventive growth; such is the absurdity that caste prejudice engenders.
Midori returned late final month (with good Turkish-American pianist Özgür Aydin) to South Asia; this time her tour circuit embraced not simply Mumbai (hosted by the Mehli Mehta Music Basis as a part of its Zubin Mehta Movie star Live performance sequence, a nod little doubt to her profession debut) and Pune but additionally Colombo, Sri Lanka. Goa slumbers on in blissful ignorance. I made one other journey to listen to her in Mumbai.
Midori’s 2019 live performance programme could possibly be broadly described as a French pot-pourri (Claude Debussy-Hartmann: Woman with Flaxen Hair; Gabriel Fauré: Sonata No.1 in A Main, Op.13; Fauré: Les berceaux, Op. 23/1 and Debussy: Sonata in G minor, L140) with a beneficiant serving to of Johannes Brahms (the whirlwind Sonatensatz: Scherzo from FAE Sonata and his mighty Sonata No.3 in D minor, Op.108).
In her 2024 programme, she started with Brahms’s buddy, confidante and muse Clara Schumann (1819- 1896). Her Three Romances for Violin and Piano, Opus 22 (1853, considerably, the 12 months Brahms entered the Schumann’s lives) written for her husband Robert’s birthday and devoted to mutual buddy violinist joseph Joachim, eloquently show her personal genius at composition, which she sadly sublimated in deference to her husband’s profession as a composer and the prevailing notion then that girls “couldn’t” be genuinely inventive.
It whetted the urge for food for Brahms’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in G main, Op. 78. Though many within the viewers awaited the pyrotechnics of the second half, this was for me, the “important course”, what I had largely come to listen to. It’s basically a sonata for violin and piano. Calling the pianist an ‘accompanist’ doesn’t do the position justice; the time period ‘collaborative pianist’ is now thought extra acceptable.
There’s one other reference to Clara Schumann; Brahms wrote this sonata in 1879m after the premature demise of the Schumann’s son (and Brahms’s godson), violinist-poet Felix at 24. Fragmentary references within the first and final actions to 2 of Brahms’s earlier songs, Regenlied and Nachklang op.59, No.3 and 4, respectively, (set to poems by his buddy Klaus Groth) of 1873, which each evoke rain, have earned it the nickname ‘Regensonate’ (Rain sonata).
A Midori live performance is a elegant expertise; she not solely performs the music, however she additionally ‘turns into’ the music, attending to its soul with each fibre of her being, and communicates it to the listener in essentially the most profound manner.
Brahms’s chamber works for piano make enormous technical and expressive calls for on the instrument, and Aydin was a delicate but versatile companion, (right here and all through the live performance) ever current however by no means in the way in which.
The second half was decidedly French, starting with Francis Poulenc’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, FP 119. Poulenc apparently did “not just like the violin within the singular” and solely wrote this sonata on the insistence of violinist Ginette Neveu, who premiered it with Poulenc as pianist. It’s one other ‘tribute’ piece, composed (1942-43) in reminiscence of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca (1898-1936). Though Poulenc (and plenty of early critics) had been dissatisfied with it, it conjures up a sound-world with uniquely Poulenc-ian harmonies, and a number of other quotes from his and others’ works. I detected a snippet from Bizet’s Carmen within the first motion, little doubt for its ‘Spanish’ flavour.
Midori-Aydin ended with Maurice Ravel; first ‘Kaddish’ from Deux mélodies hébraïques (“Two Hebrew Songs”), a heartfelt Jewish ‘Track of the Lifeless’ that by the common language of music ‘speaks’ to everybody. As I listened, Gaza was foremost in my thoughts.
The ultimate work (for which Midori put aside the music-stand and performed from reminiscence was the show-stopper, Ravel’s ‘Tzigane’ (Gypsy), in his phrases “a virtuoso piece within the type of a Hungarian rhapsody”. Writing in her personal program notes for Tzigane, the Cadenza part “calls for a specific mix of spontaneity, uniqueness, and coordination… it’s as if the performer should fully redefine violin taking part in!”
Midori did all of that and extra that enchanted night.
This text first appeared in The Navhind Occasions, Goa, India.
