Budapest 23 March 2006

By Kevin Shopland

One of the wonderful things about the Budapest Spring Festival is that it gives you the chance to hear a large number of first-rate artists with similar repertory but different performance style attitudes in a short space of time. During the last week I heard two concerts with world-famous violinist recording artists which could hardly have been more different, and two early music performances of staged vocal music (an opera and three motet-oratorios), which, again, made extremely different impressions. First, the violin concertos.

Is there a more famous, beloved and sought-after violin virtuoso today than the young Russian Maxim Vengerov? I doubt it. On March 23 the Palace of Arts was packed to capacity and quivering with anticipation at Vengerov's performance with the Pannon Philharmonic Orchestra of Pécs. He was slated to play Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto, but, apparently at his request, he played the Beethoven concerto. That turned out to be a great disappointment to me. Don't get me wrong - I love the Beethoven concerto. It's just that the (at least in Hungary) rarely performed Shostakovich would have been more interesting, and Vengerov's huge Russian sound and style of playing would have been an excellent match with that piece, as witnessed by his brilliant recording of it.

The problem was that he played the essentially classical Beethoven with the same style and approach that he would have a Romantic-Modern piece. And that was a big mistake in my book. From the kettledrum solo that opens the piece it was clear that the tempo was going to be slow. The pace gave Vengerov the opportunity to milk the piece for a singing cantabile sound, but robbed it of the dialectical, dramatic tension that characterizes the sonata form and Beethoven's music in general. In addition, the solo cadenzas he played seemed geared only toward showing off his amazing technique and were not stylistically suited to the piece. He sometimes made spine-jarring, violent contrasts, as between the middle and last movements. Personally, I couldn't wait for the piece to end. But when it did, the crowd went wild with adulation - real star cult craziness - which only increased with Vengerov's crowd-pleasing encores: a dripping-with-emotion Meditation from the opera Thais by Massenet, and a brilliant, Gypsyprimás- blooded Hungarian Dance by Brahms, calculated to drive the audience to distractionÖ and to the CD sales area, where he dedicated newly-bought copies of his CDs. I'm truly sorry that Vengerov didn't play the promised Shostakovich. Believe it or not, I'm actually a Vengerov fan, so this first experience of his playing live was a disappointment.