Heifetz Society Finds a Match in Amoyal

As a teenager in the 1960s, violinist Pierre Amoyal was a student of Jascha Heifetz. So the Jascha Heifetz Society could claim a direct connection with Heifetz’s legacy by having Amoyal close its first season at Azusa Pacific University’s Munson Recital Hall on Sunday afternoon.

But Amoyal made a key departure. While there was usually no question as to who was the dominant figure when Heifetz performed with a pianist, the team of Amoyal and pianist Frederic Chiu, who has a formidable personality and discography of his own, is one of equal, well-matched collaborators. You could sense the conversational rapport between the two in the idiosyncratic tensions and obsessions of Janacek’s Violin Sonata, and Chiu often took the lead in Brahms’ Sonata No. 3 for Violin and Piano, creatively highlighting some stormy details, provoking forceful responses from Amoyal.

Amoyal, who teaches at the Lausanne Conservatory in Switzerland, is very much in his prime, with a broad, fluid, cultivated tone that can convey passionate heat. He has a way of rounding off musical sentences with a strenuous flourish, most effectively employed in a vigorous rendition of Grieg’s Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano.

Amid this outpouring of sonatas, Amoyal and Chiu also constructed a sonatina of sorts from three numbers that normally would be relegated to the encore trade--the Heifetz transcriptions of Debussy’s “Beau Soir” and Prokofiev’s March from “The Love for Three Oranges” separated by Kreisler’s “Caprice Viennois.” Though the seductive Viennese flavor of the Kreisler eluded Amoyal, the Prokofiev had snap and incisiveness.

The real encores consisted of more Kreisler (“Liebeslied”) and an impulsive rendition of Heifetz’s take on “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”