Review Details
MUSIC IN THE UNIVERSITY RUTH WATERMAN & FLORIAN UHLIG
Alan Cooper
19 March 2009
Elphinstone Hall
On their previous visit to the Elphinstone Hall in February of 2008, the thrilling violin and piano duo, Ruth Waterman and Florian Uhlig, won a thunderous reception from the audience with their celebration of the music of Sir Edward Elgar. This time they turned the spotlight on the music of Felix Mendelssohn in this the two hundredth anniversary of his birth on 3rd February 1809.
The culmination of another outstanding recital this year was their performance of the Sonata in F major (1838). Although Mendelssohn composed three violin sonatas in total, another one in F major (1820) and one in f minor Op. 4, he left little else for the combination of violin and piano. Ruth Waterman being the indefatigable musician that she is came up with her own arrangements of Two Songs without Words originally for piano solo. She had recast these most convincingly as duos for violin and piano and with them, the pair opened their recital. The first, Op 102 no.4 presented the violin singing its heart out, afloat above a gentle tide of smooth arpeggios on the piano; the second, Op 67 no.2 was an essay in delicious lightness of touch from both performers.
Mendelssohn’s sister was also a composer and Ruth Waterman introduced us to an Adagio which Fanny Mendelssohn had composed as a salon piece to be played at a musical gathering for family and friends. Although Waterman heralded it as a piece for pure entertainment and with little depth, it was not without imagination or sophistication in its own right expressed in the fascinating momentary punctuations in the piano accompaniment.
The next three pieces in the recital were by composers connected in some way with Mendelssohn’s general musical career. As a conductor for instance he was largely responsible for reintroducing Bach to the average listener with his rediscovery and promotion of the St. Matthew Passion. Waterman and Uhlig celebrated this with a knockout performance of Bach’s Sonata in c minor BWV1017. Ruth Waterman’s playing was quite splendid but it was Florian Uhlig’s wonderfully clean clear accompaniment especially in the second movement that really turned me on. Then as Ruth Waterman had promised, her playing in the finale demonstrated why Bach is the classical composer that jazz buffs admire most often.
Beethoven’s Romance in F, Op. 40 followed, and if we do decide to accept that “Bach invented jazz”, we have to accept also after listening to this passionate and polished performance that Beethoven, the greatest composer of the Classical Era was also the progenitor of romanticism.
Schumann’s Intermezzo on FAE was a delightful short opener for the second half of the concert ushering in Mendelssohn’s F major Sonata. Here both performers offered us their most sumptuous yet refined playing. Florian Uhlig’s finger work was remarkably light and even throughout the fast movements. I do not know how he managed to keep his musical lines sounding so astonishingly seamless. Ruth Waterman sailed through the piece delivering all the passion of the slow movement or again the torrents of notes in the finale which she played with such buoyancy, as though all this required almost no effort at all. Wow! How do they do it?