IVCI's 2006 gold laureate Augustin Hadelich makes sold-out return visit

Hadelich's career launched here 18 years ago.

Devotees of the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis are used to hearing the six solo violin sonatas by Eugene Ysaye (1858-1931), the Belgian virtuoso and teacher of IVCI founder Josef Gingold, so what was bound to stand out in Augustin Hadelich's program Friday night at Indiana Landmarks Center was Ysaÿe's Op. 27, No. 3, "Ballade."

What a standout it was! The 2006 competition gold medalist's performance provoked an instant standing ovation in the middle of his recital for the capacity audience. It was preordained that the inclusion of "Ballade" would generate an extraordinary reception.

The well-defined progress of the piece, with its Romantic-inflected evocation of J.S. Bach, was so unified in concept that it seemed to mimic visual art. The impression of all-at-onceness, with which we take in paintings, made the fiendishly demanding coda less a virtuosic afterthought than an episode necessarily integrated to all that had gone before it. This was all the more exciting, in large part because Hadelich's superlative technique made everything sound ... well, not easy, but difficult in the most natural way.

He preceded this wonderful rendition with a poised, almost obsessive, one-movement sonata, "Before Sorrow," by David Lang, a contemporary composer associated with the Bang on a Can collective. Nicholas Johnson's vivid program note had me wary with this hint of warning: "At first the work seems constrained, if not tedious, but over time the listener adjusts to the struggle." 

I was just about to find "Before Sorrow" tedious before it closed shop and yielded its mysteries to the Ysaÿe, which made it shine in retrospect. An imaginative linking of two ostensibly unrelated pieces, the second one also from Ysaÿe's op. 27 sonatas, was also a feature of Hadelich's  2019 recital for IVCI. (Friday night's was co-presented with the Violin Society of America, which was just concluding its national convention in town.) 

There was one other unaccompanied work on the program, a product of the dual-citizenship violinist's American fascination: Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson's "Louisiana Blues Strut: A Cakewalk."  Its country-fiddle rhythms and fast-moving double-stopped passages folded in flavorful blues phrases. All the borrowings were distinctly projected, yet not spotty, in this neatly cohesive dancing romp, filled with cakewalk suggestions of blacks parodying upper-crust whites at leisure. 

Chih-Yi Chen has long been an IVCI pianist. 

Another American piece probing a different idiom, a North American absorption of late Romanticism, featured Hadelich's duo partnership with pianist Chih-Yi Chen. It was "Romance," by the formerly long-neglected Amy Beach. It gave the violinist a chance to indulge in his most tender and passionate playing at an inspired stretch. The pianist supported Hadelich sympathetically, as she also did in two more demanding French sonatas, which bookended the concert.

The duo opened with Francis Poulenc's Sonata, a cheeky piece with fully indulged lyrical elements. Hadelich sounded far from appalled by the syrupy side of the French composer. The pianist gave tender expression to the prayerful manner of the second movement, with its sotto voce address to aspects of the spiritual world that Poulenc suavely balanced against his wit and worldliness. The balance between the two instruments parallels the composer's comfortably divided nature. In this performance, the duo particularly caught the high spirits and rhythmic zest of the finale, with its abrupt gestures near the end neatly handled.

Capping the recital, and confirming the Hadelich-Chen musical partnership as something special, came Maurice Ravel's Sonata in G major. The first movement had the delicacy and slightly exotic atmosphere more familiar in Ravel from the "Mother Goose Suite." After an exhibition of vigorous, precise tremolo passages, the ending featured Hadelich's most ethereal playing, with the piano bell-like in accompaniment.

One of the most authentic tributes to American music from a  European composer followed in the "Blues" second movement. Hadelich's snappy pizzicatos at the start and his later mastery of bent notes and an idiomatic wobble at the very end suggested singers Ravel must have become familiar with when he visited this country. The finale thrilled with great surging and ebbing waves of virtuosity from both players. 

Two infectious encores, each drawing on folk idioms, were the duo's response to the sustained ovations. Hadelich and Chen played Eddie South's "Black Gypsy" and Manuel Ponce's "Estrellita," both calculated audience-pleasers that worked their magic dependably. The muses of Central Europe had the day off. The recital displayed just enough seriousness to impress the violin-knowedgeable members of the audience and more than sufficient charm to captivate everyone.