MUSIC REVIEW : With Unceasing Sincerity, Midori Returns to Pavilion

The glue that held Midori’s wide-ranging recital together Tuesday night before a packed Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was the complete sincerity of her playing.

There were no virtuoso tricks, no cheap appeals to the sentimental heart, not even a moment of blase boredom to let us know that she knows she has done this before. Perhaps in this sense alone the violinist sounds her age, which is 23.

With pianist Robert McDonald, her ever purposeful, pointed and meticulous collaborator, Midori explored a rather arduous and no-nonsense program capped by a piece of violinistic fluff--Saint-Saens’ Introduction and Rondo capriccioso--which didn’t seem to belong. Until she made it belong.

In a way, this was the most startling performance of the evening (we’ve heard the other works taken seriously before). Without batting an eye, she played the well-worn showpiece as if it were Beethoven--i.e. holy and good. She removed the schmaltz and the sugar and let it stand alone, a fine piece of craftsmanship not without a certain dramatic integrity, it turns out.

Her technique appears not to have suffered during a recent hiatus, a minuscule rough patch or two notwithstanding. The violin does what she wants when she wants, no grandstanding, no sweat.

In sonatas by Bartok (the exhausting First) and Brahms (the amiable Second), her expressive range was very large, yet it never approached the overblown on the one end or the precious on the other. She created a context in which it all fit, largely through her extension of the quiet and poetic aspect of the spectrum. She made full use of softness, emotive shimmers and music floating outside of meter. She found expansive musical backwaters to fathom where others find puddles.

Still, the 33 minutes of Bartok’s sonata sounded as discursive as ever; Midori’s fierce, finely detailed, ethereal and pliant reading did little to quiet one’s impatience with the work, fascinating as it is moment by moment.

She began with an appropriately prettified interpretation of Schnittke’s “Suite in the Old Style,” which became as fragile and ghostly as a Baroque composition written in 1972 should be. A rarity, Szymanowski’s “Dryades et Pan,” an Impressionistic tone poem, sparkling in its surface colors, was dispatched elegantly.

She was no slouch either in the encores: Tchaikovsky’s Melodie and Wieniawski’s “Scherzo Tarantelle,” stripped of their goo and circus-act glitz, were played with grace, clarity, interest and finesse.

How can there be any sin in sincere?