Sonata - Janacek
Chaconne in D minor - Bach
Fantasy in C minor K475 - Mozart
Divertimento - Stravinsky
Although Viktoria Mullova and Piotr Anderszewski teamed up as long ago as 1992, last night's NCH/The Irish Times celebrity concert was the first opportunity to hear them play together in Ireland.
As a duo, they work as a beautifully co-ordinated pair of technically refined individualists. In terms of rhythm they stick together, and in matters of nuance, characterisation, and propensity towards interpretative intervention, they each go their own ways. It is Mullova who favours the more sparing gestures. There's a certain severity in the clean lines of her coolly plotted phrasing. The exhilaration in her playing comes from a relish in the exact matching of musical and technical resource to expressive outcome. The results are so finely gauged, she sounds like a musician wedded to Occam's razor, a player anxious to establish the minimum level of interpretative accretion, for whom an outburst of purely personal emotion would be not so much unseemly as unthinkable.
You could characterise Mullova as a violinist likely to be happiest when her music-making draws attention to itself the least. By contrast, Anderszewski is all attitude. He worries at the music all the time, poking at accents, wanting to draw things to your attention rather than letting anything seem to work out by itself.
His solo Mozart, the Fantasy in C minor, K475, was a mixture of pianistic sophistication and musical exaggeration. And yet, in partnership with Mullova, her altogether more restrained style remained unthreatened by the puppy liveliness of his contributions. In spite of her independence, the opening Janacek Sonata ended up sounding diffuse. Her solo Bach, the Chaconne in D minor, had a rare classical poise and economy, self-effacing in a way few major virtuosos are happy to countenance. The Stravinsky Divertimento (extracted from The Fairy's Kiss) was the evening's high point. This performance would surely have been appreciated by the composer, who chided a famous conductor's urgings for musicians to sing out their lines, with a reminder that music must also dance.
