A smile plays around their lips, their eyes meet briefly: the two-second joy of two professionals over a touching first movement of Brahms’ first violin sonata, which they had just succeeded in doing. Julia Fischer, the gifted violinist, who unfolded a timbre that flowed softly and slenderly into the room at the same time, floating an enchantingly tender melancholy and allowing the charming themes to blossom. Inning, but without any suspicion. And Yulianna Avdeeva, who perceived the pianistic part with subtle restraint, springy and waiting with warm timbres.
The 36-year-old Russian is then responsible for introducing the second movement of the work with slow chords alone in the August Everding Hall in Grünwald. In this touching Adagio, Brahms expressed his grief over the illness of his godson Felix Schumann: he had visited Clara and Robert Schumann’s tuberculosis-ill son shortly beforehand on his first trip to Italy (1878), whose condition was hopeless and would soon die .
A critic wrote this music as a reminder of the “frailty of all being”, and Julia Fischer lets her gaze wander briefly up to the ceiling of the hall before her virtuoso introduction to the Adagio. Pause. Focus. In its most beautiful moments, the music opens the gates to transcendence, brings a “Memento mori” to life, grabs you beyond banal pseudo-importance.
Brahms Sonata for violin and piano in G major is a wonderful work for it: a work of deep inwardness, idiosyncratic floating, it is considered an autobiographical confession and some even as too intimate for a larger public. In the August Everding Hall, although it was sold out, this intimacy is there. In some particularly touching expressive moments, not a single FFP2 mask seemed to move on the nostrils of the audience, so breathlessly one listened to the musicians.
This appearance by Julia Fischer and Yulianna Avdeeva in the Grünwalder Concerts series was of course a special one due to the circumstances. Culture is facing a de facto lockdown again in view of the 2-G plus rules, a restriction to 25 percent occupancy and what may come in the next few weeks anyway. So this evening once again wafted through a wistful breath of goodbye, Julia Fischer announced the encore with the following words: “Before we all say goodbye to lockdown, here is a Scherzo by Brahms with the perhaps fitting motto: Free, but lonely.”
Nevertheless, the atmosphere was generally not too gloomy or even gloomy. Rather, the evening showed again what a thrilling effect a live concert can produce, especially when two great artists like Fischer, who has long since developed from child prodigy to world star, and Avdeeva, who, among other things, won the Chopin Competition in 2012 Warsaw won who are the protagonists.
Maurice Ravel’s “Tzigane”, which is one of the most technically demanding in violin literature, was a special kind of bravura piece. Fischer, who is anything but a bow lioness aiming for the effect, acts here as grippingly as it is suggestive. The first half of the piece that the French composer wrote for the Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Arányi and in which he processed more or less authentic “Gypsy tunes and themes” is written for solo violin. But also in the second half it requires the musicians to be practically sporty: Rhythmically intricate passages, pizzicato elements and comical interludes alternate, the tempo becomes furious at the end and leads to a finale that – of course also in Grünwald – diverse Bravo calls almost inevitable.
In the first part of the evening, Mozart’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in E flat major and Violin Sonata No. 2 in F minor by the Romanian composer George Enescu were on the program. Fischer performed the first-mentioned work with gripping phrasing intelligence, almost a bit brittle, so that the danger inherent in some of Mozart’s chamber music works – being nicely playful but not very exciting – was averted. However, Avdeeva’s piano playing was a bit loud here, so the tonal balance between the two instruments did not always fit. Without reservation, the performance of Enescu’s composition is great. There was a work with many moods, lush drama, late romantic touches, suggestive, weird, in a positive sense effective, galloping happily, but also characterized by quiet and magically submerged soundscapes. Here, too, shouts of bravo.