I'm writing this aboard the 23:49 train to Paddington, which is in reality the 00:24 service, putting it right on time by British Rail standards. Delays normally make me twitch, but tonight I'm cool as a Tibetan cow because I've had a good day.
I made my way up to Oxford this afternoon to putter around town a bit, pay a visit to the Turf Tavern, and catch the tail end of the Oxford Chamber Music Festival, which was set to feature a free-form evening with Ivry Gitlis followed by Henning Kraggerud performing the Ysaÿe sonatas for solo violin. Both concerts were located in the vicinity of the North Wall Arts Centre, which is perfectly fine and good for people who know how to get there, which I didn't. Being of the mind that virtually everything is within walking distance, I set out from Christ Church with the most rudimentary of maps and the most delicate of leather soles, both of which faired poorly in the rainy conditions, and by the time I plunged into the Centre I felt as though I had a layer of bread pudding between my shoes and the floor.
I did my best to overlook my bad planning and, happy to be indoors, nosed around a bit before eventually taking my seat in the theatre. The space looked practically new, and with its sort-of-timber framing and rectangular shape, reminded me of the sorts of theatres you find in the wilds of the American West, most notably the Sheridan Opera House in Telluride. A Steinway sat primly on the stage, and behind it hung a large projection screen on which we later watched a few vintage performances by Gitlis, the most impressive being Elgar's La Capricieuse and an excerpt from Bartók's solo sonata. Entertaining as these clips were, there was something very odd about watching scenes from a dvd with the featured performer, now far longer in the tooth, craning his neck to observe his younger self in the midst of perpetrating all sorts of miracles inaccessible to him in these contemporary times. Gitlis is 85, and although he favoured us with a Bartók rhapsody and a pair of Kreisler miniatures, Liebeslied and Schön Rosmarin, his prowess these days relates to talking, which he does with vigor and a heavy dose of the tangential. His preferred rhetorical mode is the soap-box sermon, and one need only issue the slightest prompt to have him make his way from a discussion of his time with Enescu to an analysis of the automaton nature of today's young musicians. Gitlis only has a hint of the curmudgeon in him though, and his caprices tend to rally around affirmation, lending him the aspect of a bushy-eyebrowed great uncle who likes to blame his minor misdeeds on his nephews and then laughingly tosses them a twenty for their trouble.
It was fun to listen to Gitlis talk, and I even found myself taking a certain amount of pleasure in his playing, which remains reasonably intact considering his age. He's not quite as capable as Isaac Stern was in his eighties, but then again they were hardly on equal footing in their primes, so I suppose it's only fair for the trend to continue into old age. At any rate, everyone in the theatre left in a nice mood and scattered across the South Parade, looking for a bite to eat. I walked around the St Edward's School campus for a while, enjoying the damp air and amusing myself by poking though a few of the textbooks the young students had left strewn about in their rush to get home for the weekend.
Half way through a French conjugation primer, I began to hear echoes of a violinist warming up, and so I picked my way to the chapel, excited to be one step closer to hearing what I'd really come to Oxford for, Henning Kraggerud playing Ysaÿe. I let myself into the building and saw that the only light inside was coming from a few space heaters mounted half way up the nave walls, and from a half-dozen bulky candles that had been skewered on sconces near the rostrum. A microphone had been set up next to a black music stand, and a sound engineer was tinkering with his dials in an ad hoc control station near the altar. I slipped into a pew at the back, and it was only a few minutes later that people began filing into the hall, creaking floorboards and straining benches as they settled into their seats. The candlelight created a predictably atmospheric setting, and it was with a fair amount of solemnity that Kraggerud and Laurent Korcia legged it onto the stage to perform the seldom-heard and once long-lost sonata in A minor for two violins, which Ysaÿe'd written for himself and Queen Elizabeth of Belgium, herself an accomplished violinist, who allegedly enjoyed fiddling with Ysaÿe both on and away from her instrument. Kraggerud and Korcia only played the piece's first movement , but did so with great power and terrific attention to the music's lines, which coyly snaked around each other, sometimes at a high rate of speed.
Korcia meandered off after the piece was done, leaving us alone with Kraggerud, who proceeded with the first solo sonata, perhaps the saddest of all, which Ysaÿe'd composed shortly after his wife's death and dedicated to Joseph Szigeti. One of Kraggerud's great strengths as a violinist is his ability to continually shapeshift in tandem with the music, and remain balanced while he's doing it. He has a wonderfully controlled bow arm, which proves very helpful in producing clean dynamic changes, particularly crescendi, without much alteration to his fundamental sound. The first sonata isn't the pyrotechnic showcase that the third, Ballade, is, but I think it's much more expressive, and far less frequently subjected to the whims of young violinists auditioning for conservatories. Kraggerud handled the third movement beautifully, playing it as an almost Hegelian fusion of Baroque and late-Romantic sensibilities, which is in a sense exactly what these sonatas are. He gave Obsession the same treatment, particularly the second movement, Malinconia, which offers us a staggeringly pitiful experience from which we really need the playful pizzicato that begins the third movement to recover. The relationship between these two movements always reminds me of the one shared by the second and third movements of Beethoven's D major piano sonata, Op. 10 No. 3, only not quite as profound or as permanent with regards to the idea of rebirth. With Ysaÿe we're back in desolate territory before long, and that's more or less where we stay through Les Furies and the piece's conclusion. Kraggerud did a nice job of infusing small touches of life where he could -- an ironic cadence here, a whippy little arpeggio there -- and the result was a performance with more ebb and flow than what's normally on offer. Ballade was suitably heart-stopping, as was sonata four's finale, but it was the fifth sonata that carried the day amongst the latter three works. Programme pieces, especially abstract ones, don't always succeed in the execution. Imaginations can get in the way and sometimes cancel out intended effects, but that's not what happened with L'aurore. I was holed up in a dark chapel, barely warmed by a squad of heat lamps, but I swore I caught a whiff of hay and felt the tingle of fresh sunlight on my cheeks. And I doubt I was alone on that score. Kraggerud's performance was one that I'd love to revisit, and who knows, thanks to the recording equipment that was in situ maybe I'll get my chance.
