Kavafian Feels Blue Over Ravel, Gershwin

Violinist Ida Kavafian announced Friday night that she and her dauntless pianist Jonathan Feldman were going to try to make the audience in the lavish Doheny Mansion feel as if they were in a cabaret.

Well, it didn’t feel quite that way, but they did succeed in pulling off an interesting twist on the old sonata habit that regulates many a violin/piano recital these days.

Presented by the Da Camera Society of Mount St. Mary’s College, the program began in 20th century France and ended in the U.S., with a succession of Poulenc to Ravel to William Bolcom to George Gershwin.

Kavafian claimed that the entire lineup was influenced by jazz--which was partly true of the Ravel Sonata No. 2, with its slithering slow movement marked “Blues,” and certainly true of Bolcom’s casual juxtapositions of swinging piano grooves, petulance and stark tragedy in his Sonata No. 2. (It goes without saying in Gershwin.)

But to claim a jazz lineage for Poulenc’s Sonata for Violin and Piano was too much of a stretch; like Bolcom, Poulenc veers between pathos and flippancy, but there is not a jazzy harmony or blue note to be heard.

In any case, Kavafian gave Poulenc a robust, aggressive rendition--not exactly evoking the cabaret. In Ravel, after an edgy first movement, she serenely followed the bluesy glides and added a few of her own in the “Blues” movement, her thick tone occasionally reminding the jazz listener of Stephane Grappelli.

After the Bolcom sonata, where Feldman caught the swing very effectively, he and Kavafian added a graceful rendition of Bolcom’s “Graceful Ghost Rag”--and the Gershwin tunes, a la Jascha Heifetz’s transcriptions, were the Prelude No. 1, “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”