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Kobler Puts Muscle Into O.C. Debut

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

In his local recital debut Wednesday, the Pacific Symphony’s concertmaster distinguished himself with a smart and muscular performance of works challenging not only for the violin but for the Irvine Barclay Theatre audience as well.

Raymond Kobler, who joined the orchestra last season after 18 years in the same post with the San Francisco Symphony, tore through a mountain of great music before a nearly full house.

For all the dazzling power of this fiddle player, he was very nearly upstaged by accompanist Jon Nakamatsu, a fabulous piano talent whose career took off after he won the gold medal at the Van Cliburn competition in 1997.

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The evening’s result was not--as might be feared--a clash of two great artists vying for supremacy, but instead a simply stunning recital. Violinist and pianist meshed not only in mundane matters of ensemble, but in artistic vision as well.

That vision is not likely to be comfortable to the fair-weather fan of classical music. Though they span a range of centuries and styles, the four works performed are difficult in their own way. None is mushy, sentimental or overly familiar.

Witold Lutoslawski’s 1984 Partita for Violin and Piano, with which Kobler and Nakamatsu opened their concert, is a tightly wound, agitated work filled with nervous melodies running back and forth between the two instruments and sudden stretches of quiet. In five short movements, the work throws everything at the audience, from a modern composer’s bag of tricks: aleatoric passages, microtones and atonality.

Later in the evening, Kobler played a second modern work without accompaniment, Solo Sonata No. 3 by Eugene Ysaye, a Belgian violinist and conductor active into the early 20th century. Playing by memory, Kobler threw himself into the steep piles of dissonant notes with virtuosic flair.

Matching these two modern works were a pair of similarly serious pieces on the other end of the repertory.

Kobler and Nakamatsu rendered a passionate, elegant reading of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9 in A, Op. 47, wringing every drop of pathos and anger from the page. Beethoven dedicated the work, now known as the “Kreutzer” sonata, to a virtuoso violinist and fellow composer by that name who famously rejected it as unplayable.

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Beethoven is also known for writing tough piano parts in chamber music, and this sonata is no exception. Yet Nakamatsu was fully in control of the notes, displaying an uncanny light facility in the most technical runs.

Soloist and accompanist were most impressive in the final work of the concert, Saint-Saens’ Violin Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 75. After a bittersweet opening, the music broke into light, sparkling sixteenth-note high jinks in the second movement and ended with a soaring, rapturous theme in the final allegro--a finish that brought members of the audience to their feet in a standing ovation that, for once, was justified.

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