A Mature Midori Finds New Emotional Resonance in Music

Now that Midori has chalked up a quarter century of life on the planet, during more than half of which she has frequented the world’s concert stages, the Japanese violinist may have finally transcended the age issue. As she amply demonstrated in recital at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater on Friday night, her increasing maturity becomes her.

Technical facility was never much of an issue for the compact violinist. If anything, she dispatches demanding music with a disconcerting effortlessness, an impression seconded by her refusal to exert any kind of “stage presence.” But Midori, always an uncanny and subtle performer, seems to be digging ever deeper into the music now, striking new emotional resonance.

Along with her refined and supportive accompanist Robert McDonald, Midori supplied the requisite balance of vigor and sensitivity on Schubert’s Sonata in A for Violin and Piano. Late in the program came the more heated romantic gusts of Franck’s Sonata in A, which brought the concert to a rousing, push-button dramatic finale. She whizzed, reliably, through the violinistic tour de force of two Kreisler pieces.

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But the real show-stopper this evening was George Enesco’s Sonata No. 3 in Minor for Violin and Piano, in which the Romanian-born composer asks the violinist to pull out the stops in the production of exotic tones and harmonic diversity. That, Midori did with a kind of breathless--even mystical--panache, coaxing supersonic harmonics, Gypsy flourish and impassioned scratchy timbres to mesmerizing effect. McDonald, meanwhile, often ladled fistful-of-notes passages around her hypnotic long tones.

In moments like this, we’re assured that Midori is growing up in public very nicely, thank you.