Sussie Ahlburg
Alina Ibragimova
A diverse program with diverse results is the Madison Symphony Orchestra’s February offering, first performed Friday evening, Feb. 12, at Overture Hall.
Maestro John DeMain is replaced this time by Daniel Hege, a conductor of wide national experience. His opening assignment is Tchaikovsky’s “Overture-Fantasy,” Romeo and Juliet. Hege works up the orchestra to considerable passion, though on Friday he seemed to me to take the slower passages a bit more slowly than is normal, somewhat reducing the organic flow.
Next is the second of the two concert suites that Maurice Ravel derived from his 1912 ballet, Daphnis et Chloé. The full ballet score (produced the same year as the very different Le Sacre du Printemps of Stravinsky) is one of Ravel’s longest compositions, on which he lavished his mastery of orchestral color and sonorities in sumptuous fashion. Hege controls all these resources with considerable skill. Again the orchestra follows a slow pacing, in the second of the three sections milking Ravel’s delicate writing, but Hege propels the final one to its full fast-and-noised potential.
The guest soloist this time around is the 30-year-old Russian-born violinist Alina Ibragimova. She has made a stir internationally, and is an undoubted talent; Beethoven’s Violin Concerto is one of her favored vehicles. Nevertheless, I confess I was underwhelmed by her performance. Her playing is technically masterful, but, I think, interpretationally misguided. (Her bodily gyrations are also off-putting.)
Ibragimova's tone is smallish to begin with, and actually rather pinched much of the time. Her sense of dynamic contrast ranges from mezzo-forte to super pianissimo. She seems to want to miniaturize much of her part, introducing a sweetness that is not nuance but merely prissiness. In the slow movement, her taffy-pulling pace blurs Beethoven’s highly individual use of theme-with-variations design. Hege does his best to give stylish support, but mostly he just has to tamp the orchestra down to minimal volume so as not to overwhelm the soloist.
We need a law requiring the identification of cadenzas used, where there are choices. No such help here, especially in Ibragimova's interpolation of one at the end of the second movement. For the first, she draws upon what Beethoven devised for his alternate piano version of this concerto, cleverly using timpani beats.
No “fresh” interpretation, then: rather, scant justice to the most titanic of all violin concertos. Repeat performances will be at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 13, and 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 14.
