Midori: Calm Before Storm : Music review: The violinist played impeccably but dispassionately--until she abandoned herself to Saint-Saens’.

For someone who is supposed to be a superstar, for someone who goes by a single name, Midori sure doesn’t rely on personal charisma to get her point across.

In fact, for three-fourths of her recital Monday night at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, she barely seemed to be relying on the violin . She most definitely is not into the tricks of its trade. She refuses to goo up a phrase, to slide around with it, juice it up, sugarcoat it, flash, preen or huff and puff with it--in short, she refuses to do the things most superstar violinists do.

With pianist Robert McDonald, her impeccable collaborator, Midori took a sober and serious view of the music at hand and played it dispassionately, taking care, however, to capture its emotive messages. The calm at the center of her readings of Bach’s Sonata No. 2, BWV 1015, Brahms’ Sonata No. 1 and Prokofiev’s Five Melodies was positively Zen-like.

But when she dove headlong into Saint-Saens’ Sonata No. 1 at the end of the program, we realized that something had been missing before--Midori’s personal advocacy, indeed, almost her personal presence.

*

Bach’s sonata had unwound as a delicate and subtle contemplation of Baroque craft, both Midori and McDonald opting for dry, pointed, uncolored sounds. Brahms’ sometimes lush and sentimental sonata had emerged understated (but not underdone), meticulous and wistful and crystal clear of texture, shorn of all the traditional performance trappings of Brahmsian oratory. The Prokofiev miniatures had been etched and polished and poised--elocution lessons.

But in a way, all this perfection and refusal to insert a subjective view into the music only called more attention to Midori herself.

She was standing right there, after all.

Which is why the Saint-Saens was by far the most satisfying piece of the evening: She abandoned herself to it; she gave in. The music became urgent, electric, warm and dangerous. The piece also happened to be the most virtuosic and showy (though never cheap) on the program, and both performers let it fly, technically and emotionally. Unforgettable.