Repertoire shift in preliminary phase signals new direction for International Violin Competition of Indianapolis

Leah Amory was distinctive in appearance and repertoire

As the 12th Quadrennial International Violin Competition of Indianapolis advances, its launch with performances this week by all the participants may fade as the public and violinists who fall by the wayside direct attention to the survivors in the semifinals and finals. Still, music lovers who don't necessarily favor Bach over Mozart or vice versa may be stunned by the disappearance  of unaccompanied violin sonatas and partitas  by the baroque master whose output is considered foundational.

In their place in the prelims is one of five sonatas for violin and piano by the late 18th-century Austrian master Mozart (or Franz Schubert's Sonatina in  D major). This decision will lend more prominence to the  focus on Mozart in the Classical Finals (Sept. 30 and Oct. 1),  where his five concertos, marvels for a 19-year-old, are in the competition repertoire.

What gives? some may ask. "It's fairer to these kids to put Mozart in the prelims rather than Bach," replies jury president Jaime Laredo, an 84-year-old maestro with a distinguished career as a concert artist. He's entitled to call contest participants, excellent fiddlers aged 18-29, kids. He went on as we chatted during a pause Sunday morning at the Indiana History Center: "As soon as they get up there with Bach, they antagonize half the audience," he said (with pardonable exaggeration?) about today's violinists.

Interpretive contrasts abound in Bach performance, he explained, "and teachers' views are so varied as to interpretation." There is no commonly accepted way to play Bach, particularly on modern instruments. Laredo added a germane but strictly unrelated anecdote that may shed light on the range of pleasurable Bach performances and why competition accounts might be problematic. Many years ago he took an LP featuring the Swingle Singers, an ensemble originally based in France and led by American tenor Ward Swingle, on a visit to the home of the great cellist Pablo Casals, who had brought Bach's works for unaccompanied solo cello out to public acclaim. In the 1960s, the Swingle Singers made hit records using the leader's vocal arrangements of instrumental Bach pieces, accompanied by bass and drums.

"I was curious — I couldn't figure out how Casals would respond," Laredo said. The Spanish cellist, born in 1876, might be expected to put strict boundaries around acceptable Bach performance. Laredo recalls his host listened with a neutral expression, puffing on a cigar. At the end of the record, Casals' face lit up as he exclaimed: "That's the way Bach should be played!"

So, Mozart has taken a position of prominence in this competition phase along with the solo  sonatas of Eugene Ysaye, the Belgian violinist who was the chief teacher of IVCI founder Josef Gingold (1909-1995). 

Dongmin Lim showed the gift of sprezzatura.

Just before my revealing chat with Laredo, the IVCI audience was treated to what seemed tome the best of the nine performances I heard over the first two mornings of prelims. Dongmin Lim of South Korea captivated me from the start with his account of Mozart's Sonata in A major, K. 305. The first movement was lively and firmly centered in well-projected tone. In the second movement, there was a fresh personality evident, something beyond command of the music. The movement has loads of personality on its own and Kim engaged with it. 

Then, after an evocative account of Paganini's 11th caprice (the Italian virtuoso's opus 1 caprices are another essential feature of the prelim repertoire) came a version of Ysaye's Sonata No. 6 that swept me away. Suddenly I recalled a comment Isaac Stern, the reigning violin eminence of post-war America, made that might offend some today, since even favorable stereotypes tend to be scorned. (I once suffered an editor removing my reference to Italy being famous for song. I was not allowing for countless tone-deaf Italians, apparently.) 

Stern said somewhere, in a quip I dare to repeat here: "Koreans are the Italians of the Orient." The rightness of that assessment was unmistakable in Lim's Ysaye: passionate, borderline impulsive, but nicely controlled, well-balanced overall yet without any diminishment of energy. Understandably, the Italians have a word for what Lim displayed: "sprezzatura," a "studied nonchalance,"as one standard dictionary puts it.

There was sprezzatura as well in Lim's performance of the best-known Paganini caprice, No. 24. The skittering variations were not troublingly headlong, and the piece from stem to stern had lots of flair the way this participant played it. His programming as well was fresh. Allowed to select two Paganini caprices, he didn't pair them but put the Ysaye in between, after the flavorful No. 11. The bon-bon at the end, the Wagner/Wilhelmj "Albumblatt," cast balm over this splendid set. 

Elli Choi evinced rapport with Hindemith and Ernst.

Also worth recalling, with a touch of novelty, was Elli Choi's performance of Hindemith's eccentric but sensibly laid out Solo Sonata. It was a rare choice from among the repertoire list that was otherwise weighted toward Ysaye, and she brought it off with a knack for finding unity in its unusual construction. 

Her interpretation of  Ernst's Variations on "The Last Rose of Summer" harvested the fruit of the polyphonic emphasis of the set's title. It was veritably sculptural in how it handled the sentimental theme and its extensive decoration. To my ears, it was evident Choi has genuine faith in the piece as music, not just a display opportunity. Her encore choice, Fritz Kreisler's arrangement of Cecile Chaminade's "Serenade espagnole,"  showed her to be confident and unabashed about the piece's sentimentality, concluding with a poised episode in harmonics. 

I was also taken, this time among the Sunday performances, with Leah Amory's individuality (in both dress and artistry), expressed in her playing of Schubert's Sonatina. The first movement was full-voiced and assertive. The characteristic minor-mode contrast in the second movement had the requisite Schubertian two-mindedness about it;  in the finale the mercurial Franz was aptly foremost. I didn't care for her slightly insecure 12th Paganini caprice. But her Ysaye choice (No. 2, "Obsession"), with its manic Bach reference and recurrent "Dies irae" quotations, projected a strong melancholy together with an intensity that  rose up with spectacular force in  the "Les furies" conclusion.

[Photos by Denis Ryan Kelly Jr.]