MUSIC REVIEW : JAAP SCHROEDER IN MOZART PROGRAM AT ATHENAEUM

The Dutch violinist Jaap Schroeder, one of the seminal figures of the period-performance movement, brought his enlightened artistry to the physically and acoustically inviting Athenaeum at Caltech on Sunday for a program of Mozart sonatas with American pianist Elaine Thornburgh, a presentation of the Da Camera Society of Mt. St. Mary’s College.

Schroeder’s playing combines warmth of tone with a degree of tension unusual among “authentic” instrument performers. His violin is, of course, strung with gut, rather than metal. But he does not play at the radically low pitch--in Mozart, at any rate--favored by most of his colleagues. And rather than dispensing with vibrato entirely, Schroeder employs it sparingly and to telling expressive effect.

The overall sound of his work, while impossible to confuse with that of a “modern” violinist, thus proves a good deal less alien than that of such comparably well-known antiquarians as Sigiswald Kuijken, Monica Huggett and Sergiu Luca.

Schroeder’s ebullient and spotless playing of three major sonatas--in F, K. 377, in D, K. 306, and in A, K. 526--was hugely effective Sunday without quite making the listener oblivious to the disparity between his confident mastery of instrument and idiom and the pianist’s less secure manner.

It was a good idea to have the major-key duos separated by minor-key solo piano works--two of Mozart’s most substantial and profound, the Adagio in B minor, K. 540 and the Rondo in A minor, K. 511. But in spite of the appropriately slim, plaintive sound of her instrument, a modern copy of Mozart’s own 1784 concert piano, Thornburgh’s metrically rigid performances left the lyric elements of the music largely unrealized.