Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s combination of brilliance and mischief is usually enough to fill set the hall buzzing on its own in the violinist’s recitals. However, there were two kindred spirits on the platform with her this time: her regular, similarly adventurous pianist partner Polina Leschenko and Reto Bieri, whose clarinet seemed to be speaking directly to the audience.
At the beginning of the second half he and Kopatchinskaja were indeed vocalising, little grunts and glissandos punctuating their sonic impersonations of busy little insects in the little prelude to Leo Dick’s 2014 children’s opera The Ant and the Grasshopper – as if there were a tiny Queen of the Night on stage with her gruffer-voiced King. There were no throwaway numbers in this recital, and this tiny piece was treated to as much care and focus as the other duos: Milhaud’s upbeat Jeu, and the more obviously serious work in the first half, Vivier’s Pièce for Violin and Clarinet. For the Vivier, Bieri and Kopatchinskaja walked on while playing quietly, their lines circling each other and then coming together in mellifluous, concentrated concurrence, creating a bubble of intensity on the platform. That ended in a small but telling theatrical gesture, as Kopatchinskaja seemed to throw something and Bieri to catch it.
It was that subtle but constant sense of music’s theatrical potential that underpinned everything, down to the wistful little Weimar-esque waltz that was their encore. It was there in the whirling klezmer melodies of Paul Schoenfeld’s 1990 Trio, and, in a different form, in the searching tenderness Bieri and Leschenko brought to Poulenc’s Clarinet Sonata.
It was most obvious, though, in the driving folk-inspired passages of Bartók’s trio Contrasts and Enescu’s Violin Sonata No 3, the latter a fantastically meaty and modern work that we don’t often get to hear, not least played with such enveloping spirit. Kopatchinskaja’s violin swooped and swerved between notes, and Leschenko whipped up thunderstorms on the piano, but they were never irreverent Indeed, these performances were more respectful to Bartók’s and Enescu’s intentions than a hundred dully well-meaning ones.
