UCSB Arts & Lectures is bringing two classical superstars, violinist Itzhak Perlman and pianist Emanuel Ax, to town to play on The Granada Theatre stage at 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 21, 2016.
The published program consists of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart‘s Sonata No. 17 in C Major for Violin and Piano, K. 296 (1778); Gabriel Fauré‘s Sonata No. 1 in A Major for Violin and Piano, Op. 13 (1875-1876); and Richard Strauss‘s Violin Sonata in E flat Major, Op. 18 (1887-1888).
With musicians of this stature, all we really need are the names to set us scrambling for tickets. An interesting program like this one is an added incentive, but even if Perlman were playing an all-Benjamin Britten concert (the horror!), I would probably cancel any other engagement to be there — though I might not be awake at the end of it.
That is to say that, having given the names of the artists and listed what they are to play, the vital part of this preview is at an end.
Nevertheless, irrepressible pedant that I am, I feel a few brief remarks about the music would not be out of place — except the Mozart, of course, because that would be gilding a lily.
Neither the Fauré and the Strauss sonatas on the other hand are such familiar fixtures of the modern recital repertory to raise no questions whatsoever.
Except for his incidental music for Pelléas et Mélisande, Requiem in D Minor Op. 48 and Piano Quartet No 1, Op. 15 (composed around the same time as this sonata), Fauré did something of a disappearing act after his death in 1924.
It wasn’t until it was taken up by Perlman and his fellow baby-boomers that the Sonata No. 1 began to gradually ease back into the repertoire of fiddlers.
It is unlikely to ever become a pop favorite. Though it is exquisitely beautiful, its lack of ornamentation and virtuoso fireworks will keep its admirers to a small but intense circle.
Fauré wrote plenty of lovely melodies, but they are woven unemphatically into the fabric of his austere lyricism. His appeal is to introverts, not extroverts.
Webern‘s much-touted purification of means speaks more to his lack of ideas than his musicality, unlike Fauré, who never takes the less-is-more principle to extremes.
Strauss, on the other hand, has never let go of the general audience. He gets no respect from critics and musicologists, who will never forgive any artist whose appeal to the bourgeois audiences is immediate and lasting.
They also resent the fact that his uncanny gift for orchestration is apparently effortless. He is the rare composer who actually got rich off his music, and his operas and his tone poems will always be with us.
This may not be a universal experience, but I personally find myself tiring of his works on recordings, but I have never heard any live performance of his music that failed to keep me enthralled.
This recital will offer a chance to test this hypothesis, since I don’t believe I have ever heard the sonata played live.
It is something of a hobbyhorse with me, but I think that Israel’s ban on Strauss’s works is a completely raw deal. To be sure, he accepted the appointment as head of German music under the Nazis, but his contempt for them, especially Goebbels, could not be concealed, and they wound up hating him.
He did what he could for the Jews he knew, including some in-laws, but, unlike Schindler, he had no sense of strategy nor was he a con-man.
And talk about a double standard, the Israelis ban Strauss and embrace Carl Orff, who was an enthusiastic Nazi (until he suddenly wasn’t) and wrote Carmina Burana for the Nuremberg rally following the one celebrated by Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will.
The Nazis asked Strauss to write incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream so they didn’t have to use the great score by the Jew Mendelssohn.
Strauss refused, indignantly. Orff accepted, though the project was later dropped.
Tickets to this concert range from $48-$128 for the general public and $16 for UCSB students with a valid I.D.
They can be purchased from the Arts & Lectures box office at Campbell Hall (805.893.3535), the Granada Box Office (805.899.2222) or The Granada’s website.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.