RECITAL OF BACH WORKS : FRIED AT AMBASSADOR

The most demanding challenge a musician can meet is facing an audience from an empty stage. The recital platform, wherever its location, offers no haven for the unprepared, provides no visual distractions, accepts no excuses. Alone on that stage, one either produces or fails.

With violin and bow her only visible tools, Miriam Fried appeared, all alone, on the Ambassador Auditorium stage Monday night to play Bach. In selecting a program consisting of three of that composer’s six unaccompanied works for violin, Fried dared much. In returning to Los Angeles after a 13-year absence with this solo agenda, she risked much.

Yet she triumphed, as did Bach, in what appeared to be a climactic moment locally of his tercentenary. In the E-major Partita and the Sonatas in A minor and C (Nos. 2 and 3), Fried communicated the composer’s myriad nonverbal messages, created long musical lines, met in every movement all demands of style and technique, and made these feats of virtuosity seem easy and natural.

Monday, the 39-year-old musician from Israel had the disadvantage of a program some may consider esoteric, plus the competition of an appearance, only a few miles away, by another leading violinist of her generation. As a result of both conditions, perhaps, her audience, counted by the Ambassador Foundation management at 287, did not fill the hall.

But Fried did, with tone and music and affectionate details. Unhurried but inexorable tempos and articulate movement were her rule. Without sentimentalizing the accumulation of resonance and tension in longer movements, she let that accumulation operate on the listener. Without rushing the continuity of progressive phrases, she shaped their inner workings. Mechanically, neatness and order reigned, though never at the expense of linear values.

As a totality, the program moved from the relative emotional moderation of the E-major Partita, through the more complicated feelings in the A-minor Sonata, to peak in the grandeur of the inner movements of the C-major Sonata. That fugue is, of course, one of Bach’s creative summits; Fried allowed its seriousness to emerge from an immaculate reading. Some of the details will change as the performer lives with the work; none detracted from her strong, nuanced and cohesive overview of it.

Despite prolonged applause and clear approbation from one of the more attentive audiences one has encountered in recent months, Fried chose not to follow her printed program with an encore.