Duelling Violins at La Musica Chamber Music Festival

Chamber music on the Gulf of Mexico

Paul Huang, Danbi Um, and Juho Pohjonen

Despite regularly visiting Sarasota, Florida, since 2009, I only became aware of La Musica, Sarasota’s yearly chamber music festival, a few seasons ago. In 2022, musical direction of the festival was taken over by the pianist Wu Han, who also co-directs the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (since 2004) and was the founder and is still the co-artistic director of Music at Menlo (since 2002). The caliber of musicianship at the festival is, as one can imagine, very high. But the festival also has a wonderfully relaxed feel, perhaps because it takes place just steps from the Gulf of Mexico, and because one can attend open rehearsals and talks. Performances are held at various locations, including at the Sarasota Opera House downtown, and at the Riverview Performing Arts Center, a beautiful auditorium at a local high school for the performing arts.

Last weekend at Riverview the festival held a pre-festival concert highlighting violin virtuosity. (The festival begins in earnest in mid-April.) The violinists, both young and endowed with impressive resumés, were Paul Huang and Danbi Um, joined by the also young Finnish pianist Juho Pohjonen. On the program were dazzling works for strings and piano by Fauré, the fin-de-siecle German-Polish composer Moritz Moszkowski, Edvard Grieg, and Eugène Ysaÿe. The playing, which favored the violins, had that quality of gleaming brilliance that makes one wonder whether there are still any challenges left for the young players of today. Intonation, verve, fireworks, they had it all.

The two violinists alternated moments in the spotlight. Huang took on Fauré’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in A Major, a youthful work that begins with a flurry of notes on the piano, almost as if it were already in the middle of things. Like a surfer, Huang caught the wave and rode its highs and lows with his singing melodies and fluid, limpid line. The second movement, a barcarolle in minor key, brought out an especially diaphanous sound, like a distant melody floating in the breeze. The scherzo, with its playful pizzicatos and competitive repartee with the piano, was like a game.

Moszkowski is known to me mostly as the composer of salon pieces, including the charming “From Foreign Lands,” which the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky used as the basis for an equally charming ballet. But Moszkowski’s Suite for Two Violins and Piano in G Minor is a more serious work. Here, it was possible to get a sense of the two violinists’ contrasting sounds—Danbi Um’s earthier, warmer tone in dialogue with Huang’s lighter and more crystalline quality. As in an aria for two contrasting voices, soprano and mezzo, the violinists wove around each other in the “Lento Assai,” with its Bach-like counterpoint. Um’s mellower voice was particularly suited to hymn-like motif of the second movement.

After the intermission, the Grieg Violin Sonata, played by Um and Pohjonen, introduced a hint of storytelling. It opens with a melancholy gypsy-like melody, before shifting into a dance passage, brightening like a summer day after a storm; then settling into a voyage of discovery for piano and violin. The Adagio is haunting and quiet, with passages for very high notes that glow like the Northern Lights. And then the mood shifts once more, into a swooping folk dance in triple meter in which the piano and violin follow each other, partners at a barn dance.

The real challenge of the evening came next: a violin sonata for two violins in A minor by the Belgian composer Eugène Ysaÿe. The sonata is a real tour de force, requiring great focus, both from the musicians and the audience. The model is Bach, the partitas as well as the double violin concerto. The tone is somber, stark, almost religious. The two voices interweave in complex counterpoint, creating thick, resonant textures. In certain sections, especially in the “Maestoso” movement, harmonies predominate; in others, each violin takes the lead, while the other comments, retorts, questions. Deep concentration is required to follow the work’s inner logic. And it was here, as in the final piece on the program, that Huang and Um seemed most engaged with each other. They had to be.

The Ysaÿe was followed by Amy Barlowe’s “Hébraïque élegie” for Two Violins, a weepy lament, with hints of Piazzolla, dedicated to the composer’s father, and played by Um and Pohjonen. Sarasate’s “Navarra,” a fireworks display of violin pyrotechnics in the form of a Spanish jota–but with some Viennese schmaltz thrown in—was the closer. Here, the two violinists could show off all their tricks: little squiggles on the highest notes, almost inaudible to the human ear. Perfectly-timed spiccato bounces off of the strings, effects that suggested other instruments, like the organ grinder and the gaita.

The Navarra is an audience favorite for Huang and Um, and it is here that they appear to be having the most fun. (Link to an earlier performance below.) Each is an exceptional player, but to see them really engage with each other added another layer of delight. Virtuosism isn’t exactly a model of cooperation—the level of difficulty is too high, the technical feats too dazzling for that. But here, that feeling of making music together, which is the essence of chamber music, emerged in full.