Gil Morgenstern Doesn’t Blink in the Lights

It’s worth remembering that the true test of a live performer is how well they hold up under duress. Maybe because of this latest spell of global warming, it was visibly hot onstage during violinist Gil Morgenstern’s latest edition of his Reflections Series concerts at WMP Concert Hall last night. To say that he didn’t break a sweat wouldn’t be close to true – instead, he and New York Philharmonic pianist Jonathan Feldman went with the heat and delivered a program that even when it wasn’t searing, was characteristically captivating. Morgenstern’s technique is such that he’s able to play anything he wants, which typically means challenging and exhilarating material. He also likes themes – this one was, as he put it, “exile and unfinished journeys,” inspired by a recent Isaac Julien exhibit in Miami, where Morgenstern also performs this ongoing series.

Morgenstern opened solo with Bruce Saylor’s Dante Suite, originally written as a theatre work, but as the violinist noted, he commissioned it to be workable as a concert piece as well. To call it a trip through hell and then out would be accurate in a general sense, although this particular tour has unexpected nuance. As Saylor (who was in attendance) wrote it, the Gates of Hell offer an understated drama, while the unconsummated adulterers Paolo and Francesca – destined to spend eternity with their backs to each other – receive a vividly plaintive, sad theme. Brunetto Latini gets to experience if not enjoy a fiery, gypsyish passage in the remarkably interesting Circle of Sodomites; the Woods of the Suicides, a powerfully evocative, brooding segment, became a showcase for Morgenstern’s judiciously vibrato-laden dynamics. The suite closed with a finale that ran from a repetitive circular theme to a crescendo packed with sizzling riffs that played against open strings.

Feldman joined in on Janacek’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, a suite about life under an enemy occupation (in this case, Austria’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in World War I) and finally the joy of overthrowing the oppressors. Feldman’s rippling precision gave Morgenstern the perfect backdrop for his apprehensive cadenzas and wounded, lyrical sustained lines. The piece ends somewhat unexpectedly on a theme of bitter remembrance rather than exuberance, and the duo brought it down, hushed, for a quietly potent impact. Morgenstern then tackled Erwin Schulhoff’s 1927 Sonata for Solo Violin, a gripping four-part suite that runs from an almost Celtic dance, through a bracingly intense overture, an off-center, Bartok-esque scherzo and finally an aptly titled Allegro Risoluto which was nothing short of hypnotic.

Morgenstern is also something of a raconteur, and as he cautioned the audience, his explanation of the intrigue behind Ernest Chausson’s Poeme, Op. 25 might take longer than the piece itself. It didn’t, but it was worth hearing Morgenstern relate how the piece related to an Ivan Turgenev short story, a couple of mistresses, a May-December marriage and a possible case of mistaken paternity: such things were common in the artistic classes in the Nineteenth Century. The piece itself seems to be an elegy for a failed or broken romance: it takes awhile to get going, but when it does it sounds suspiciously like Erik Satie stole a secondary theme for his Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear. Morgenstern and Feldman ended it with a bright melancholy, as Ravel might have done it. They closed the program with methodical renditions of a couple of late-career Smetana pieces which were pleasantly if generically consonant, in an early Romantic vein; the duo could have finished with the Chausson and taken a well-deserved breather and the show wouldn’t have suffered. Morgenstern’s Reflections Series returns to WMP Concert Hall on April 14, followed by stops in Italy in May and Boone, North Carolina in June.

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