Above and featured: The artists featured in Musica Viva’ final national tour for 2023 – Noa Wildschut (violin) and Elisabeth Brauss.
The combination of violin and piano has been a classic and popular one over time.
These two visiting musicians round off a stellar Musica Viva year for us via a densely varied programme of music. Their chosen programes are a charming vehicle for reinventing the power of violin and piano duo music.
The pair’s excellently refined playing obviously delighted the crowd at the concert I attended. Their playing and introduction of keyboard and string eloqunce spanning three centuries was dripping in carefully collaborated choices of nuance and exemplary synergy.
The standard of sympathetic duo playing as well as the programme structuring of this musical and emotional event was exquisite, energetic, elegant and endlessly enviable.
The chosen concert programme celebrates the skilful intimacy and delicate rendering of music for violin and piano. The examples of this come from some of the huge emotional and conceptual compositional voices of all time.
Three sonatas, from Schumann, Franck and Debussy,show interesting and virtuosic shades of the accompanied violin sonata model.
A Musica Viva commission returns to the svelte fabric of this final tour. Commissioned to honour the memory of two people, the six individuals involved in the commission enabled a highly effective and adroit atmosphere to be created for the pair by Melbourne-based composer May Lyon.
Forces of Nature (2023) emerged from the stage in its post-interval position with the signature sensitivity we had come to expect already from the visiting musicians. Using pitch material specific to Wildchut or Brauss as individuals, Lyon maintained shape in this work also as she followed an extramusical story linked to the environment. This clever work challenged the pair with extremely delicate and sparse figurations, ever-shifting textures and intricate intertwining of lines.
These challenges are admirably met, and the multi-layering within this premiere work explored with detailed, respectful utterances. The organic growth as well as the musical ebb and flow that May Lyon carefully paints for us and for this event are successfully realised by Wildschut & Brauss. It is a worthwhile and enjoyable work, now part of the violin and piano canon, and already enduring through the course of this Musica Viva tour and repeat performances.
The violin and piano canon was beautifully celebrated in this concert. As well as the three sonatas, the programme featured Olivier Messiaen. It is always an exciting concert event when Messiaen is included, Wildschut & Brauss presented his earlier work, Theme et Variations (1932).
Violinist and pianist display their special and intrinsically well balanced blend in their interpretation of this work as they do in the concert’s earlier and the commissioned later work. Messiaen’s use of traditional meter, to be discarded in later writing, did not confine his free sense of line, angle and emotion.
This fine playing of Messiaen from the pair was also present when winning over the crowd with the Sonata for Violin and Piano in G minor (1917) from Claude Debussy’s late period.
The sharing of line and echoing of motifs in this work is a stunning take-home for the audience. This plus moments of skilful manipulation of nuance is a highlight of being fortunate to hear post-impressionist Debussy.
A similar seamless sharing of line from Wildschut and Brauss opens the concert programme as the Schumann Violin Sonata No 1 in A minor is heard. Here, an attractive warmth is present and also drama that shifts appropriately between the soaring extrovert and retreatting introversion, making for successful Schumann performance.
As in this Schumann work, the popular Sonata in A major for Violin and Piano of 1886 sees the pair pay great attention to melodic, emotional and structural detail. Their playing as a duo and as individuals is skilfully measured. It features an admirable approach to preserving moments that could be played by employing the softer spectrum of nuance whilst keeping solid their crystal clear blend.
The tonal works in this programme are played with focussed, rich tone. The works themselves maintain the tonal or pitch set tessitura around G and A. Even when the sonata by Romanian George Enescu substitues in for the Franck, it is also in this higher part of the tonal ladder, being in A minor.
Wildscut & Brauss have made quite a musicological and emotional splash during their first national tour of Australia. Their particular brand of musical ease, accomplished, mature interpretations, sensitivity and bold restraint easily has an audience on the edge of its seat. Such concert performances will always be welcome and we await their return.