This past Sunday was a special day for the handful of people who made it to the Wigmore Hall. Not only were they able to hear a selection of Razumovsky Academy students fiddle away for a few hours, but they were also able to listen to Ida Haendel in her dual role as Masterclass giver and honorary concertizer. Haendel is pawing at 80, but remains freakishly adept at playing some of the most difficult pieces in the violin repertoire. She hit the stage fresh off the street, and within two minutes had shed her coat and was showing a thirteen-year-old Norwegian student how she might play the opening measures of Wieniawski's Polonaise in D. No warm up, no problem. Next there was a brief tinker with Franck's sonata, which, while difficult in its own way, is like a bagatelle compared with the fiendishly difficult Sibelius concerto, which was next on the docket. Haendel patiently coached the student through the piece, borrowing her instrument now and then to whiz through a passage or two, and removing the shoulder rest to do so, which, I have to confess, delighted me as much as hearing her play, because there's hardly a more conspicuous demonstration of late-Romantic allegiances than playing the fiddle au naturel.
A concert by the Academy students followed in the evening, and much was made of an impending "surprise," though a less mysterious surprise there's never been, as we all expected Haendel to play and that's just what she did. She sauntered onto the stage after the interval, dressed like Cleopatra and looking cool as a cucumber, and announced that she'd like to play Bach's Chaconne for our listening pleasure. This news made me a bit nervous, and I recall wondering whether or not she'd bitten off more than she could chew in the sense that the piece requires a tremendous amount of effort to realize. Thankfully, my concerns were unfounded. She played with less gusto than the young hotshots previously on stage, but with absolute security, and in fact got me thinking that perhaps the Chaconne should only be played by people who just barely have the strength to pull it off. Listening to her performance, I suddenly became aware of an ebb and flow within the music that operates along effort and rest lines, first swelling like bellows and then sputtering to near breathlessness. The dynamic did wonders to enhance the music's inner voices, and made any technical glitches completely irrelevant. It was a remarkable performance, and I have to say that I found it more impressive than anything I'd heard her play when she was young. I guess that's the thing with legends, living or otherwise: it might take a while, but they always find a way to amaze.
