O’Connor’s String Technique Dazzles

As Stephen Vincent Benet once wrote of another player, Mark O’Connor could fiddle all the bugs off a sweet-potato vine. Touring in support of his new solo CD, “Midnight on the Water,” O’Connor stopped on Sunday at UCLA’s Royce Hall with a masterful display of instrumental technique and musical imagination.

Highlights of the recording include a set of caprices O’Connor dedicated to Paginini, and he played three of them Sunday.

Ear dazzlers pure and simple, they place a premium on high-energy rhythmic passion and the quickest, cleanest bowing possible, and draw much less on O’Connor’s vast fund of melodic invention. In his hands, spiccato string-crossing becomes a viable end in itself, however, while his feel for form keeps interest focused and astonishment undissipated. An artist who has crossed over so many boundaries that his style is purely personal, O’Connor introduced each caprice with an improvisation, roaming easily and widely through fields vernacular and classical.

O’Connor is also as agile of mind and hand with a flat-pick as he is with a bow. On guitar he played the fiercely strummed “Flailing” and the playful “Fancy Stops and Goes,” as well as a medley called “Almost ‘Apostle,’ ” pieces he wrote for “The Apostle” that were not used in the film. On mandolin, he touched blithely on both his “Midnight on the Water” and “Appalachia Waltz” CDs.

O’Connor ended with the title track from the new album, one of his rare miscalculations. The expressively wistful “Midnight on the Water” waltz by Luke and Benny Thomasson is uncomfortably yoked with the harmonically and melodically limited “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” which does not bear the weight of its lengthy and, in context, redundant barrage of bowing pyrotechnics.

The rest of O’Connor’s fiddle agenda brought in early Americana from his “Liberty!” recording, excerpts from his first Fiddle Concerto, and an elegantly hot tribute to Stephane Grappelli. In encore, O’Connor added his quicksilver adaptation of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and his movingly embellished “Amazing Grace.” Amazing and graceful indeed.