New York Classical Review

The word “talent” says so much and so little. It says that there is something promising, but that could also mean so many things: technique, poise, charisma, artistry. It’s also the quality that Young Concert Artists cultivates and promotes in classical musicians starting their performing careers.

YCA’s latest concert presentation, violinist Oliver Neubauer playing at the Morgan Library Wednesday afternoon, was a shining example of the whole package of defining qualities of talent. Accompanied by pianist Chaeyoung Park, Neubauer showed off superb technique: a big, glistening, singing tone, exacting intonation, skill at shifting timbres, and in some extended techniques. He showed off a musical sense of phrasing and dynamics, of knowing where the key parts of a composition lie and how best to get there. And most impressively, he displayed the kind of taste and judgement that make a musician always worth hearing.

As he explained from the stage, his recital program had a specific, engineered shape to it, starting with the sweetness of Mozart’s Adagio in E Major, K. 261, and gradually moving into more complex, knotty, and even downbeat emotional territory, then coming out the other side with Fritz Kreisler’s Viennese Rhapsodie Fantasietta.

The outer ends were the least interesting stretches. In the opening Mozart Adagio the playing was both a little too subdued and a little too deliberate. The Rhapsodie because the sepia-Viennese-postcard quality feels more awkward in the 21st century, and also because it came immediately after a stunning performance of the Poulenc sonata.

First, though, Neubauer had to get there. The path to Poulenc traveled through the Suite from Much Ado About Nothing by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and the world premiere of Unwinding for Solo Violin by Hannah Ishizaki, who was on hand to introduce the work.

Korngold’s suite is dazzlingly pictorial, and Neubauer dove right in. Every note and moment sounded rich, full of sound and life, avoiding any easy sentimentality in Korngold’s themes for a rich, glowing feeling. The comedy in the second movement was nice and simple, the sheer loveliness of the music for the garden scene understated while still full of feeling via the violinist’s gorgeous sound. This was a plain-spoken pleasure.

Ishizaki talked about some of the technical aspects of her piece, like the way she used some specific fiddle techniques, and talked about how she saw it as problem solving, unwinding compositional puzzles. And that was there, on the surface.

Yet Ishizaki’s music delivered much more than her introduction promised. Underneath there was a compelling expressive journey that paralleled what Neubauer was doing in the concert. Declarative passages alternated with more scrabbling ones, then the music unwound into an evocative exploration of Bartókian fragments and an impassioned expression of inward-looking ideas. 

The Poulenc Violin Sonata is a tremendous masterpiece, as fine an example of what the genre can be as Beethoven’s “Kreutzer.” The structural logic comes from a personal combination of curiosity, wit, and vehement feeling, conveyed through a close, often intense dialogue between the instruments.

The piano doesn’t play for the violin but with it, and here was a chance to hear Park’s own musicianship, her agile touch and thinking, great energy that pushed the whole performance forward. Neubauer used accents and articulation for force without undue weight. The two were understated in the astonishingly beautiful Intermezzo, the playing giving the music a feeling of expanding in multiple directions. 

The final movement has the marking “Presto tragico,” likely the only time those two words have been put together. And that’s the movement and the piece, full of light and energy and always seeming to be running ahead of something darker, even tragic. Indeed, that’s the denouement, played with deadpan seriousness by the pair. 

After this, Kreisler felt like an encore, and insubstantial. But acknowledging the applause, the pair returned with a real encore that perfectly balanced the mood, a meaty, punchy Prelude No. 1, from Gershwin.

Cellist James Baik plays Boccherini, Debussy, Britten, and Mendelssohn, 7 p.m. Thursday, April 23, at Merkin Concert Hall yca.org