NCH, Dublin

Brahms

– Sonata Movement in C minor; Sonata in D minor Op 108.

Christopher Theofanidis

– Fantasy.

Franck

– Sonata in A.

American violinist Sarah Chang is a forceful musical personality by any reckoning or yardstick. She’s one of those players who takes hold of a piece of music the moment her bow touches a string.

Give her a gutsy tune in the throaty-toned higher reaches of the violin’s bottom string and she’ll respond with a result that’s thrillingly like the experience of a high-powered sports car under throttle. Give her rhythmic agitation and she’ll bite and chomp with pulsating power. Give her a lush melodic line, and she’ll hug it with loving care or spin it out with effortless, long-breathed ease.

Her programme for the National Concert Hall’s celebrity concert series was mostly A-rated stuff, sonatas by Brahms and Franck, and the movement that Brahms contributed to a composite work by three composers (the others were Robert Schumann and Albert Dietrich) in honour of the great violinist, Joseph Joachim.

Chang was partnered by a classy pianist, fellow American, Andrew von Oeyen, who made light of the difficulties in works where the pianist is, in truth, more challenged than the violinist. And, yet, the evening didn’t work out as one might have expected it to. It was as if the two players, each fully engaged with their individual responsibilities, were somehow not fully engaged with each other. An essential tension was missing.

Chang, of course, generates a lot of tension on her own. The contrasts of fire and sweetness in her musical temperament, her willingness to bend a tempo in order to change gear, or spring a moment of soft-spoken surprise, were always engaging. But her presentation was just so vivid that Oeyen ended up sounding more like a foil than a genuine partner.

The movements that found both players at their best were the finales of the two sonatas, highly energised in the case of Brahms’s D minor Sonatas, intertwined with beautiful fluidity in the imitative chasing games of the Franck.

The evening's novelty, Christopher Theofanidis's Fantasy, an arrangement for violin and piano of the slow movement of the concerto Theofanidis wrote for Chang in 2008, was in a sadly bland, neo-romantic style.