Word: violins
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ease, as author Annie Dillard once wrote, is the way of perfection, violinist Gil Shaham may be the classical music world's most polished performer. By the end of his performance with the Boston Symphny Orchestra Saturday night, he had convinced the rapt audience at Symphony Hall that Mendelssohn violin concertos simply grew out of his gleaming Stradivarius without effort, toil or even a few hours' practice...
Granted, Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E minor is one of the most popular and playable concertos in the violin repertoire. Upon the advice of the violinist for whom he wrote the concerto, Mendelssohn avoided difficult technical writing, not because it would make the piece inaccessible, but because it was not essential to the piece's form. Nothing, in fact, is superfluous to the concerto's form. Critics called this straightforward style innovative and even revolutionary in the then-stagnant concerto repertoire...
...Mendelssohn concerto is standard concert material simply because it is good, not because consummate performers like Gil Shaham like to play it. Shaham's masterful performance on Saturday night, though, drew out the piece's best qualities. Shaham began the violin solo with a rich, elegaic tone, bringing depth without melodrama to the tragic melody. He continued with a flexible tone that was glittering in his sublime upper register and lusty and rich in the low, and an impressive dynamic range that challenged the orchestra to match...
...emergence as a musical matinee idol. "It's my personality," he says. "When I come onstage, the audience is in my hands. I'm feeling very well when I'm standing there in the lights, seeing the public and having fun with my orchestra. It's very nice playing violin for 20,000 people. They laugh, they cry, they give me flowers...
Rieu is hardly the first musician to fill concert halls by playing Viennese waltzes and polkas. Johann Strauss II composed On the Beautiful Blue Danube and dozens of other classic waltzes for his own touring orchestra, which he led while simultaneously playing the violin (a practice emulated by Rieu); countless other purveyors of light classical music have flourished since. What sets Rieu apart is timing. Today's conductors and soloists, however gifted, mostly lack the charisma of the previous generations of classical-music giants such as Leonard Bernstein and Vladimir Horowitz, and they have largely failed to capture the imagination...