MUSIC REVIEW : Zukerman and Neikrug in Recital

At 44, still the dashing, remarkably handsome, ever-smiling virtuoso, Pinchas Zukerman seems the embodiment of young talent. It’s startling to realize that the Tel Aviv-born violinist has been a touring international artist for a quarter-century now--he made his first Los Angeles-area appearance, in Fullerton, of all places, in 1969. Time flies. . . .

At his latest local appearance, in Segerstrom Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Saturday night, Zukerman showed again that his widespread popularity among the general concert-going public and his respected position in the affections of connoisseurs remains fixed. In a world of rising and falling artistic fortunes, this musician maintains his standards.

In a demanding but accessible program of unhackneyed sonatas, Zukerman and his longtime pianistic partner, Marc Neikrug, exerted those standards rigorously. They made beautiful music that satisfied the senses and titillated the mind.

Most provocative was their utterly authoritative but clearly affectionate revival of Bela Bartok’s Sonata (1922), second--and shorter and tauter and, inexplicably, more neglected--of the composer’s twin works in the form.

It is inarguably a masterpiece, but one we seldom hear. Zukerman/Neikrug gave it its due, its heart, its rich thought, its emotional breadth. In an acoustical setting particularly helpful to the sounds of violin and piano as duo, they gave it its resonances too. And, in the process, they nearly silenced the coughers who earlier had threatened to spoil the event.

The rest of this program occupied a similar plateau of achievement and communication.

Schubert’s pristine, wonderfully tuneful and endlessly poignant Sonatina in A minor began the program without fireworks, but with an admirable directness of expression rare on today’s concert stages--as always. Zukerman’s easy technical command and fluid string tone proved, as before, remarkable.

The same combination of unforced musicality, virtuosic instrumentalism and intellectual/poetic sensibilities marked the duo’s playing of the post-intermission sonatas: Mozart’s in C major, K. 303, and Faure’s First, Opus 13.

Zukerman-the-fiddler--on this occasion, we were forgetting his forays as violist and conductor--again impressed one listener as an ultimate music-maker, one who delivers wholeheartedly all the outward requirements of each work, then lets it speak for itself. No meddling, no interference, no ego-gratification. The only icons on this stage were Schubert, Bartok, Mozart and Faure. No other heroes were needed.

By way of encore, the team offered, as a bookend to its opening Schubert piece, the slow movement from the same composer’s G-minor Sonatina.