The pairing of violinist Leonidas Kavakos and pianist Yuja Wang is a promoter’s dream – two big instrumentalist names on one concert billing. But such a combination does not guarantee an artistic slam dunk. Though each boasts technique to die for, Kavakos is essentially an introspective musician, Wang his polar opposite. Neither of these styles is any more valid than the other, but the enticing question in this Wigmore recital was how these musical personalities would combine in some of the most important works in the violin and piano repertoire.
The answer was dictated by the programme. Three of the four items – the sonatas by Janáček and Debussy, along with Bartók’s first sonata – were completed within a five-year span at the end of the first world war. The exception, Schubert’s C major Fantasy D934, needs no apology whatsoever and Kavakos and Wang played what is sometimes regarded as a purely lyrical work with considerable interpretative weight. It felt, nevertheless, as if the duo would have made greater impact with a contrasting violin sonata from the same darkly fruitful postwar period for the form (of which there are many, from Fauré to Hindemith) instead.
In the Janáček and the Bartók sonatas, the two soloists shared the same musical space rather than combining in anything like the classical manner. By placing himself so squarely in front of Wang, and often playing with his back to her and focused on the score, Kavakos also tended to embody the fact that this was a high-level collaboration rather than a natural synthesis. At times, his playing seemed deeply self-absorbed, though always with engaging results. But it also felt as if he was exploring the range and outer limits of the violin’s sound palette – darkly gritty in the Janáček, mysteriously ethereal in the Bartók – for its own sake, while letting Wang do her thing, which she always did with beauty of tone as well as impeccable accuracy.
Debussy’s sonata requires the two to create a more unified or at least more collegiate sound world. There were many amazingly fluent touches and passages of formidable interplay from both artists, including some lovely portamenti from Kavakos. Yet the performance did not quite capture the unique idiom of Debussy’s highly concentrated final score. The Bartók, by contrast, was an irresistible success, a collaboration that matched prodigious technique and a vast range of violin and piano sound with a wholly convincing grasp of the work’s ambition and originality.
