Whenever old friends and colleagues Itzhak Perlman and Daniel Barenboim get together to play chamber music in public, the results are bound to be instructive, engaging and doubtless humbling to lesser violinists and pianists in the house.
Perlman and Barenboim staged another such reunion Monday night at Orchestra Hall to launch the 1994-95 Lexus Great Performers Series, with nearly a full house of boorish, cough-happy fans in attendance.
On this occasion, it was Barenboim who made the more satisfying impression, not because he and Perlman hadn’t mastered the tricky ensemble challenges posed by the three sonatas but because the violinist too often fell heir to the same vagueness of intonation that had plagued him in last week’s concerto performances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Barenboim.
In short, the evening wasn’t prime Perlman and certainly was no match for the duo’s brilliant Beethoven sonata cycle heard here a few seasons ago, of which their encore served as a nostalgic reminder.
That left Barenboim to carry the major musical burden in the two big late Romantic sonatas on the program, Edward Elgar’s and Richard Strauss’. His playing was typically big, mettlesome and flexible, although occasionally too forceful, tipping the balance toward the piano while leaving the violin in the tonal shadows.
They began with one of J.S. Bach’s violin and clavier sonatas, the G Major, BWV 1019. By current standards of baroque performance style, the performance was “wrong” as could be-big in scale, romantic in expression, meaty in tone. But there were no purists in the house, and Monday’s performers functioned on such a high level of collaborative understanding one could easily forgive the anachronisms. The somber chromatic pull of the Adagio sounded surprisingly modern, while Barenboim articulated the “cembalo” solo with crisp elan.
The Elgar sonata, dating from 1918-19, is seldom heard and certainly takes well to the sweeping, full-blooded approach it got from Monday’s performers. Sometimes Perlman sacrificed purity of sound and intonation to heroic striving. Even so, he and Barenboim (a notable Elgarian, as he has proved on his recordings of the orchestral works) savored the twilit musings of the central Romance quite beautifully and their response to the shifting harmonies and autumnal moods of the finale was suitably intense.
Richard Strauss wrote half a dozen chamber works of which the Violin Sonata in E-Flat, Opus 18, is doubtless the finest. For the young composer it marked both a nostalgic closure and a bold beginning. In its symphonic breadth and scope you hear pre-echoes of “Don Juan” and other great symphonic works to come, while the outer movements pit violin against piano in a concerto-like struggle for supremacy.
Perlman began badly, his intonation all over the place, but with Barenboim taking the lead the soaring declamation and wistful languor of the Allegro were never in doubt. Better was the Andante, which really sounded like a lyrical improvisation, the violin lingering warmly over the pianist’s rippling figuration. In the finale, Barenboim made it sound as if he had an entire orchestra under his fingers. Over the piano part the violin had to execute a whole series of virtuosic runs and arpeggios. Perlman tossed them off with perhaps more vigorous flourish than polish.
